Preparing Today for the Mines of Tomorrow

Maritime mining long has been called on to support various naval strategies. However, shifting objectives and naval priorities call for new analysis. By adapting methodologies developed for land mines, we can find measures of effectiveness (MOEs) aligned to operational objectives, explore developmental mining concepts, and present new MOEs for maritime mining operations

Using Gaussian Mixture Model and Partial Least Squares regression classifiers for robust speaker verification with various enhancement methods

In the presence of environmental noise, speaker verification systems inevitably see a decrease in performance. This thesis proposes the use of two parallel classifiers with several enhancement methods in order to improve the performance of the speaker verification system when noisy speech signals are used for authentication. Both classifiers are shown to receive statistically significant performance gains when signal-to-noise ratio estimation, affine transforms, and score-level fusion of features are all applied. These enhancement methods are validated in a large range of test conditions, from perfectly clean speech all the way down to speech where the noise is equally as loud as the speaker. After each classifier has been tuned to their best configuration, they are also fused together in different ways. In the end, the performances of the two classifiers are compared to each other and to the performances of their fusions. The fusion method where the scores of the classifiers are added together is found to be the best method

The Declining Presbyterian Church

In this thesis I will discuss how the Presbyterian Church has been declining in membership and in the number of people attending weekly services. Within this study, I use my own church, Niagara Presbyterian Church in Niagara Falls, NY as a case study to further prove what is happening within the Presbyterian Church. Though the trend of declining church attendance can be seen across most denominations, I will show how the Presbyterian Church specifically is struggling and show why it is unique in its situation along with other characteristics of the decline that have happened across the denominations. I close out the thesis by giving some advice for how to try and slow the decline and possibly bring more members into the church, first by specifically referring to Niagara Presbyterian Church than expanding to churches in general that are facing these issues

Pump, Dump, and then What? The Long-Term Impact of Cryptocurrency Pump-and-Dump Schemes

The pump and dump scheme is a form of market manipulation attack in which coordinated actors drive up the price of an asset in order to sell at a higher price. Due in part to a lack of enforcement, these schemes are widespread within the cryptocurrency marketplace, but the negative impact of these events on the coins they target is not yet fully understood. Drawing upon a novel dataset of pump events extracted from Telegram channels, an order of magnitude larger than the nearest comparable dataset in the literature, we explore the differing tactics of pumping channels and the long-term impact of pump and dump schemes across 765 coins. We find that, despite a short-term positive impact in some cases, the long-term impact of pump and dump schemes on the targeted assets is negative, amounting to an average 30% relative drop in price a year after the pump event

A1_8 Chitty Bang Bang

The film Chitty Chitty Bang Bang tells the story of a man and his incredible car. One of the things his car was capable of is the ability to fly. This paper investigates the feasibility of such a vehicle based on the film specifications. In reality the car as it is seen in the film would not be able to fly but by increasing the wing area from 10m2 to 56.99m2 the car would be able to take-off within its normal performance parameters