Self- and Super-organizing Maps in R: The kohonen Package

In this age of ever-increasing data set sizes, especially in the natural sciences, visualisation becomes more and more important. Self-organizing maps have many features that make them attractive in this respect: they do not rely on distributional assumptions, can handle huge data sets with ease, and have shown their worth in a large number of applications. In this paper, we highlight the kohonen package for R, which implements self-organizing maps as well as some extensions for supervised pattern recognition and data fusion.

Children and youth in the sex trade : exploitation and exiting

The purpose of this thesis is to look at the current treatment of children and youth who are being exploited by the street sex trade. An understanding of the issues faced by these young people needs to be present before successful solutions can be developed and implemented. This thesis argues that children and youth are forced into the street sex trade by social and economic factors that are outside of their control. Young people do not have realistic alternatives to engaging in the street sex trade. Their involvement in the sex trade amounts to survival sex which may be the only way that they are able to provide for themselves. The lack of realistic alternatives to engaging in prostitution related offenses leads to the argument that charging children and youth with these types of offences is a violation of their basic rights under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Criminal charges do not address the realities that lead to sexual exploitation through the sex trade. Constructive steps need to be taken to deal with this issue in a way that allows for positive changes to occur. It is argued that programs that aim to address the root issues leading to sexual exploitation through the sex trade should be developed and supported. These programs should attempt to divert children and youth off the streets as a more permanent solution, rather then charging them under the Criminal Code. Effective solutions need to be found to protect the children and youth from further exploitation through the sex trade

Rape and "consent to force" : legal doctrine and social context in Victorian Britain

This thesis is an exercise in the historical use of legal analysis. It illuminates the social construction of gender in an era of changing social mores, by relating rape doctrines to demographic, economic, social, and cultural changes. Changes in the rape law of early Industrial Britain (1800-1860) are examined as: 1). results of ideological changes since the eighteenth century; and 2). causes of the creation of Victorian sexual culture. The ideology of “Separate Spheres” for men and women led to a fearful sexual regime which prescribed chaperoning to ensure women’s chastity. Law made women’s avoidance of being alone outside, where they could become prey of strange men, a requirement for sexual respectability, because rape became more difficult to prove.The 1817 rural Midlands murder case of Rex versus Abraham Thornton caused popular controversy because the judge said physical evidence of brutal sex was not inconsistent with consensual sex: the woman could have been “persuaded” by violence: reasonable doubt on the rape meant the accused was presumed to lack a motive to kill the deceased. Thornton was influential on law and gender ideology. “Consent to force”—the idea that a woman could meaningfully consent to sex after violence—was extended in later rape cases. Secondly, even though the public reacted against Thornton’s acquittal, popular culture interpreted it to support “Stranger Danger”—that women risk rape by strangers while out alone, and should remain at home unless accompanied by trusted men. “Consent to Force” and “Stranger Danger” worked at different levels of the social hierarchy. But both served to extend Separate Spheres to working class women.Law undermined traditional mores which had supported the North West European marriage system—late marriage, small age difference between brides and grooms, nuclear family households, and numerous adolescents working in others’ homes as servants, resulting in low rates of premarital births during long courtships. Young commoners had managed a sexual balancing act by engaging in sexual exploration while refraining from vaginal intercourse. Late marriage, very low illegitimacy, and high rates of prenuptial conceptions of first marital births, resulted from young couples engaging in sexual intercourse only when conditions for marriage were right. Young men had to marry pregnant sweethearts, because communities could identify putative fathers.Industrialization threw the North West marriage system out of balance: young men became more mobile and able to evade forced marriage. It also became more difficult for young men, especially artisans, to achieve the status traditionally associated with marriage. This sexual crisis was exacerbated by upper class libertinism spreading to commoner men. The Thornton case promoted libertinism among all men, to allow men of higher class to approach lower class women for prostitution.The moral denigration of lower class women under rape law after Thornton was the flip side of the association of marriage with making wives consent to sex upon demand by their husbands, under Fraternal Patriarchy. Categorizing women as “bad girls” or “good girls” became central to rape law, yet illusory. Lower class women “persuadable” by force were subjected to similar constraints as wives: both were to think selflessly about fulfilling men’s “needs”. Bourgeois wives, like domestic servants, entered lifelong contracts to serve heads of households upon demand. Domestic torts based upon the property right of masters of households to service provided by wives and children, as well as servants, linked treatment of different classes of women. But because lower class women were not marriageable to elite men, their premarital chastity was not considered as valuable. Working class women’s gender value was discounted; working class men were emasculated as potential heads of households, by economic instability interfering with marriage, the displacement of men’s authority over wives to their employers, and the 1834 New Poor Law, which proposed removing wives and children from working class husbands and fathers when they went onto relief. De-gendering of lower class women and men was reflected in the difficulty that lower class men had in obtaining damages for domestic torts. Privileging of the bourgeois with respect to gender contributed to the failure of feminist and labour movements to cement a political alliance. Industrial-era rape doctrines were ultimately applied to all women rape complainants, regardless of class status, and became the basis for the anti-victim rape laws which second wave feminists analyzed and opposed. Modern rape law still presents women with similar challenges, based upon rape myths like Stranger Danger

Spectral-spatial classification of hyperspectral images: three tricks and a new supervised learning setting

Spectral-spatial classification of hyperspectral images has been the subject of many studies in recent years. In the presence of only very few labeled pixels, this task becomes challenging. In this paper we address the following two research questions: 1) Can a simple neural network with just a single hidden layer achieve state of the art performance in the presence of few labeled pixels? 2) How is the performance of hyperspectral image classification methods affected when using disjoint train and test sets? We give a positive answer to the first question by using three tricks within a very basic shallow Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture: a tailored loss function, and smooth- and label-based data augmentation. The tailored loss function enforces that neighborhood wavelengths have similar contributions to the features generated during training. A new label-based technique here proposed favors selection of pixels in smaller classes, which is beneficial in the presence of very few labeled pixels and skewed class distributions. To address the second question, we introduce a new sampling procedure to generate disjoint train and test set. Then the train set is used to obtain the CNN model, which is then applied to pixels in the test set to estimate their labels. We assess the efficacy of the simple neural network method on five publicly available hyperspectral images. On these images our method significantly outperforms considered baselines. Notably, with just 1% of labeled pixels per class, on these datasets our method achieves an accuracy that goes from 86.42% (challenging dataset) to 99.52% (easy dataset). Furthermore we show that the simple neural network method improves over other baselines in the new challenging supervised setting. Our analysis substantiates the highly beneficial effect of using the entire image (so train and test data) for constructing a model.Comment: Remote Sensing 201

Self- and Super-organizing Maps in R: The kohonen Package

In this age of ever-increasing data set sizes, especially in the natural sciences, visualisation becomes more and more important. Self-organizing maps have many features that make them attractive in this respect: they do not rely on distributional assumptions, can handle huge data sets with ease, and have shown their worth in a large number of applications. In this paper, we highlight the kohonen package for R, which implements self-organizing maps as well as some extensions for supervised pattern recognition and data fusion

Studies on Tumour Active Compounds with Multiple Metal Centres

Four tumour active trinuclear complexes: DH4Cl: [{trans-PtCl(NH3)2}2m-{trans-Pd( NH3)2(H2N(CH2)4NH2)2]Cl4, DH5Cl: [{trans-PtCl(NH3)2}2m-{trans-Pd( NH3)2(H2N(CH2)5NH2)2]Cl4, DH6Cl: [{trans-PtCl(NH3)2}2m-{trans-Pd( NH3)2(H2N(CH2)6NH2)2]Cl4, DH7Cl: [{trans-PtCl(NH3)2}2m-{trans-Pd(NH3)2-( H2N(CH2)7NH2)2]Cl4 and one dinuclear complex DHD: [{trans-PtCl(NH3)2}�-{ H2N(CH2)6NH2}{trans-PdCl(NH3)2]Cl(NO3), have been prepared and characterised based on elemental analyses, IR, Raman, mass and 1 H NMR spectral measurements. For the trinuclear complexes, the synthesis has been carried out using a step-up method branching out from the central palladium unit. A purity of about 95% has been obtained by repeated dissolution and precipitation. The activity against human cancer cell lines including ovary cell lines: A2780, A2780 cisR , A2780 ZD0473R , non small lung cell line: NCI-H640 and melanoma: Me-10538 have been determined based on MMT assay. Cell uptakes, DNA-binding have been determined for ovary cell lines: A2780, A2780 cisR . The nature of interaction with pBR322 plasmid DNA and ssDNA has been studied for trinuclear complexes DH4Cl, DH5Cl, DH6Cl and DH7Cl and the dinuclear complex DHD. Interaction of DH6Cl with adenine and guanine has also been studied by HPLC. The compounds are found to exhibit significant anticancer activity against cancer cell lines especially ovarian cancer cell lines: A2780, A2780 cisR and A2780 ZD0473R . DH6Cl in which the linking diamine has six carbon atoms is found to be the most active compound. As the number of carbon atoms in thelinking diamine is changed from the optimum value of six, the activity is found to decrease, illustrating the structure-activity relationship. The increase in uptake of the trinuclear complexes in A2780 cell line with the increase in size of the linking diamine coupled with the low molar conductivity values found for the solutions of the compounds suggest that the compounds would remain in solution as undissociated �molecules� and hence could cross the cell membrane by passive diffusion. Much lower resistance factors for the all the multinuclear compounds including DHD as applied to A2780 cisR cell line, as compared to that for cisplatin, suggest that the compounds are able to overcome multiple mechanisms of resistance operating in the cell line. All of the multinuclear complexes are expected to form long-range interstrand GG adducts with DNA, causing irreversible global changes in the DNA conformation but unlike cisplatin do not cause sufficient DNA bending to be recognized by HMG 1 protein. Increasing prevention of BamH1 digestion with the increase in concentration of the multinuclear compounds also provide support to the idea that the compounds because of the formation of a plethora of interstrand GG adducts are able to cause irreversible changes in DNA conformation. The results of the study show that indeed new trinuclear tumour active compounds can be found by replacing the central platinum unit in BBR3464 with other suitable metal units