Development of a Drone-Mounted Wireless Attack Platform

The commercial drone market has grown rapidly due to the increasing utility and capabilities of drones. This new found popularity has made it possible for inexpensive drones capable of impressive carry capacities and flight times to reach the consumer market. These new features also offer an invaluable resource to wireless hackers. Capitalizing on their mobility, a wireless hacker can equip a drone with hacking tools to surpass physical security (e.g. fences) with relative ease and reach wireless networks. This research seeks to experimentally evaluate the ability of a drone-mounted wireless attack platform equipped with a directional antenna to conduct wireless attacks effectively at distances greater than 800 meters. To test this hypothesis, the “skypie v2” prototype conducts computer network attacks against a target network and captured data is used to evaluate the effectiveness of the platform. Results showed that capture of a WPA2 handshake was possible at a RSSI of -72 dBm or 2400 meters from a network located in a open field. Additionally, nmap scans were conducted with a RSSI value of -74 dBm or nearly 3000 meters from the target network

Essays on Development Microeconomics in Ghana

Developing countries are urbanizing, transitioning out of agriculture, and expanding social protection programs. In order to understand the economic consequences of these phenomena, it is important to understand the way that individual and household behavior adjusts in response to these changes. This dissertation examines this interplay; I study how cultural institutions and structural transformation interact, and evaluate the effects of a specific form of social protection: cognitive behavioral therapy. In Chapter 1, I examine the ways in which a specific set of cultural institutions, land inheritance rules, interact with economic opportunities outside of agriculture. In particular, I examine the effects of female land inheritance on economic productivity in Ghana, by examining variation in inheritance customs across ethnic groups. In patrilineal groups, land passes from fathers to sons. In contrast, inheritance rules are more flexible in matrilineal groups; land can pass to both men and women. This flexibility improves productivity by allowing men and women to better optimize their labor allocation, taking into account gender differences in the outside options available. In matrilineal groups, women are more likely to inherit land, which leads to them managing farms and supplying labor to their own plots. Their inheritance induces men to exit agriculture and work for a wage. This improves male labor productivity and produces higher per capita consumption. In contrast, because women face additional barriers to participating in the labor market, male inheritance under patrilineal inheritance is associated with women supplying labor to male-owned plots, and supplying less labor in total. Two mechanisms explain the positive effects of female inheritance on male labor productivity: (1) men who exit farming capture the returns to their skill, because the wage labor market rewards cognitive skill, while farming does not, and (2) the wage labor market offers an earnings premium over agriculture. This gain does not come at the expense of reduced farm productivity, which does not differ across the two inheritance regimes. These results thus suggest that asymmetric constraints on men and women interact in important ways with occupations outside of agriculture, and suggest that more flexible systems of inheritance can generate productivity benefits as countries transition out of agriculture, but women\u27s economic opportunities in the labor market remain limited. A frequently stated aim of social protection programs is to positively affect the productivity of those participating in these programs. Chapter 2 considers the impacts of a specific form of social protection program, cognitive behavioral therapy, as a means of improving human capital when delivered to a general, low-income population in rural Ghana (N=7,227). Results from a randomized evaluation show strong impacts on mental and perceived physical health, cognitive and socioemotional skills, and economic self-perceptions when measured 1-3 months after the conclusion of the program. These effects hold regardless of baseline mental distress. Evidence suggests that this is because CBT can improve well-being for a general population of poor individuals through two pathways: reducing vulnerability to deteriorating mental health, and directly increasing cognitive capacity and socioemotional skills

Learning genetic regulatory network connectivity from time series data

Journal ArticleAbstract. Recent experimental advances facilitate the collection of time series data that indicate which genes in a cell are expressed. This paper proposes an efficient method to generate the genetic regulatory network inferred from time series data. Our method fi_x000C_rst encodes the data into levels. Next, it determines the set of potential parents for each gene based upon the probability of the gene's expression increasing. After a subset of potential parents are selected, it determines if any genes in this set may have a combined eff_x000B_ect. Finally, the potential sets of parents are competed against each other to determine the fi_x000C_nal set of parents. The result is a directed graph representation of the genetic network's repression and activation connections. Our results on synthetic data generated from models for several genetic networks with tight feedback are promising

'The Great Meeting Place': A Study of Bradford's City Park

noCity Park opened in early 2012 and despite some on-going criticism, during the summer the site drew thousands of people to the heart of Bradford and was the scene of much relaxed and good natured conviviality amongst socially diverse groups. As a new and unique public space in Bradford and a focal point for the city, a number of staff from the Centre for Applied Social Research believed researching City Park to be a fruitful endeavour to help promote a dialogue with the public and other sectors about living together in Bradford

Learning genetic regulatory network connectivity from time series data

Journal ArticleAbstract-Recent experimental advances facilitate the collection of time series data that indicate which genes in a cell are expressed. This information can be used to understand the genetic regulatory network that generates the data. Typically, Bayesian analysis approaches are applied which neglect the time series nature of the experimental data, have difficulty in determining the direction of causality, and do not perform well on networks with tight feedback. To address these problems, this paper presents a method to learn genetic network connectivity which exploits the time series nature of experimental data to achieve better causal predictions. This method first breaks up the data into bins. Next, it determines an initial set of potential influence vectors for each gene based upon the probability of the gene's expression increasing in the next time step. These vectors are then combined to form new vectors with better scores. Finally, these influence vectors are competed against each other to determine the final influence vector for each gene. The result is a directed graph representation of the genetic network's repression and activation connections. Results are reported for several synthetic networks with tight feedback showing significant improvements in recall and runtime over Yu's dynamic Bayesian approach. Promising preliminary results are also reported for an analysis of experimental data for genes involved in the yeast cell cycle

Low level Atrazine exposure effects on crayfish development

Undergraduate Applie