Efficient Analysis of Complex Diagrams using Constraint-Based Parsing

This paper describes substantial advances in the analysis (parsing) of diagrams using constraint grammars. The addition of set types to the grammar and spatial indexing of the data make it possible to efficiently parse real diagrams of substantial complexity. The system is probably the first to demonstrate efficient diagram parsing using grammars that easily be retargeted to other domains. The work assumes that the diagrams are available as a flat collection of graphics primitives: lines, polygons, circles, Bezier curves and text. This is appropriate for future electronic documents or for vectorized diagrams converted from scanned images. The classes of diagrams that we have analyzed include x,y data graphs and genetic diagrams drawn from the biological literature, as well as finite state automata diagrams (states and arcs). As an example, parsing a four-part data graph composed of 133 primitives required 35 sec using Macintosh Common Lisp on a Macintosh Quadra 700.Comment: 9 pages, Postscript, no fonts, compressed, uuencoded. Composed in MSWord 5.1a for the Mac. To appear in ICDAR '95. Other versions at ftp://ftp.ccs.neu.edu/pub/people/futrell

Master of Arts

thesisThis thesis deals with the United States perception of Simón Bolívar, the liberator of six South American republics. Heralded today as a hero, in his lifetime, Bolívar endured a barrage of criticism from United States diplomats and other public figures who saw him as power hungry and monarchical in his designs. Diplomatic correspondences, congressional debates, personal memoirs, and press articles during the years 1811 to 1831 reveal the origins of these views of the Liberator. The sources demonstrated that people in the United States failed to understand Bolívar's actions or motives as a military and political leader in northern South America. At first these North Americans saw Bolívar embracing United States style of republicanism and following George Washington's example of peacefully giving up power in the interests of the republic. Critics began to suspect Bolívar as having imperial ambitions and lusting for power, the very antithesis of Washington. Only Bolívar's public resignation from his position of power silenced these critics. As important, some public figures never abandoned their positive view of Bolívar. Certainly President Andrew Jackson saw him as a model of republicanism, a sentiment that ultimately prevailed in the United States. During the development of relations between North and South America, new racial ideologies emerged in the United States. The notion of innate racial differences and natural superiority of white United States citizens profoundly shaped the image many in the United States held of South Americans. Those who embraced the innate superiority of white North Americans in the United States saw their South America neighbors as lacking the necessary characteristics for an effective republic. The increasingly hostile opinions of Bolívar corresponded with a rising sense of the natural superiority of the U.S. embodied in the notion of descending from Anglo-Saxons. The lens of republicanism, notions of race, and perceptions of a model government help us capture how the young republic of the United States interpreted the development of republicanism in the Western Hemisphere

Factors That Influence Mothers\u27 Decisions Concerning Breastfeeding

The purpose of this study was to explore factors that influence decisions concerning breastfeeding in a group of 30 mothers who are employed, place their children in a childcare center, and whose children are five years of age and under. The study utilized Fishbein and Ajzen’s Theory of Reasoned Action as the conceptual framework. The descriptive study allowed for determination of the factors of attitudes, beliefs, and opinions that influence mothers’ decisions concerning breastfeeding. Statistical data compiled from survey results revealed many participants believed that breast milk is less expensive than formula. However, a significant number of mothers were neutral concerning the health benefits of breast milk. The convenience sample used for this research study indicated mothers did not fully understand the benefits of breastfeeding. This study exposed lack of knowledge of mothers concerning breastfeeding and identified various factors that influenced mothers’ decisions in infant feeding. By identifying factors that influence mothers’ decisions about breastfeeding, healthcare providers may develop an action plan to effectively educate mothers concerning the benefits of breastfeeding

The liminal figure of Julia Morrison \u27ladyhood\u27 in Chattanooga, Tennessee, 1899-1900

In September of 1899 Julia Morrison James shot and killed Frank Leiden on the stage of the Chattanooga Opera House in Tennessee. The two were the leading actors in the play entitled Mr. Plaster of Paris. The court charged Morrison with first-degree murder and held her in the city jail through the end of her trial in January of 1900. Public support was overwhelmingly behind the female murderer until the end of the trial. The jury found Morrison not guilty of the murder of Leiden on the grounds of temporary insanity. Immediately after the jury announced her acquittal Morrison began announcing plans to give a lecture entitled The Other Side of Stage Life and thanking all those who played a role in her just verdict. Chattanoogans and other southerners held Morrison up as a lady and representative of ladyhood from the moment she murdered Leiden through the delivery of the verdict. It was assumed that as a lady in the South she would be found not guilty. Southerners did not consider her behavior after the verdict appropriate for a lady, and public opinion began to turn against her, the verdict, and Chattanoogans. Morrison caused southerners as members of the New South to reevaluate what qualities constituted a lady, making her a liminal figure in the South\u27s conceptualization of ladyhood. The change represented in Morrison\u27s case is also found in comparing her case to that of two other murderesses in Tennessee in 1893 and 1913. The 1893 trial ended with a verdict of not guilty due to incurable insanity, and the 1913 trial ended with a guilty verdict. Together these three cases demonstrate the transition present in Morrison\u27s case in the span of three decades at the turn of the twentieth century

Informatics solutions for large ocean optics datasets

Ocean Optics XXI, Glasgow, Scotland October 8-12 2012Lack of observations that span the wide range of critical space and time scales continues to limit many aspects of oceanography. As ocean observatories and observing networks mature, the role for optical technologies and approaches in helping to overcome this limitation continues to grow. As a result the quantity and complexity of data produced is increasing at a pace that threatens to overwhelm the capacity of individual researchers who must cope with large high-resolution datasets, complex, multi-stage analyses, and the challenges of preserving sufficient metadata and provenance information to ensure reproducibility and avoid costly reprocessing or data loss. We have developed approaches to address these new challenges in the context of a case study involving very large numbers (~1 billion) of images collected at coastal observatories by Imaging FlowCytobot, an automated submersible flow cytometer that produces high resolution images of plankton and other microscopic particles at rates up to 10 Hz for months to years. By developing partnerships amongst oceanographers generating and using such data and computer scientists focused on improving science outcomes, we have prototyped a replicable system. It provides simple and ubiquitous access to observational data and products via web services in standard formats; accelerates image processing by enabling algorithms developed with desktop applications to be rapidly deployed and evaluated on shared, high-performance servers; and improves data integrity by replacing error-prone manual data management processes with generalized, automated services. The informatics system is currently in operation for multiple Imaging FlowCytobot datasets and being tested with other types of ocean imagery.This research was supported by grants from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, NSF, NASA, and ONR (NOPP)

Statistical Thermodynamics

Contains research objectives and reports on one research project.U. S. Air Force (Office of Scientific Research, Air Research and Development Command) under Contract AF49(638)-9

The synthesis of speech using a digital computer

Thesis (B.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Physics, 1959.MIT copy bound with: Ground state reaction energy determination for K⁴¹(p,α)A³⁸ / Robert William Bird and Theodore Neil Divine. 1959.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 16-18).by Robert Peel Futrelle.B.S

Full Text and Figure Display Improves Bioscience Literature Search

When reading bioscience journal articles, many researchers focus attention on the figures and their captions. This observation led to the development of the BioText literature search engine [1], a freely available Web-based application that allows biologists to search over the contents of Open Access Journals, and see figures from the articles displayed directly in the search results. This article presents a qualitative assessment of this system in the form of a usability study with 20 biologist participants using and commenting on the system. 19 out of 20 participants expressed a desire to use a bioscience literature search engine that displays articles' figures alongside the full text search results. 15 out of 20 participants said they would use a caption search and figure display interface either frequently or sometimes, while 4 said rarely and 1 said undecided. 10 out of 20 participants said they would use a tool for searching the text of tables and their captions either frequently or sometimes, while 7 said they would use it rarely if at all, 2 said they would never use it, and 1 was undecided. This study found evidence, supporting results of an earlier study, that bioscience literature search systems such as PubMed should show figures from articles alongside search results. It also found evidence that full text and captions should be searched along with the article title, metadata, and abstract. Finally, for a subset of users and information needs, allowing for explicit search within captions for figures and tables is a useful function, but it is not entirely clear how to cleanly integrate this within a more general literature search interface. Such a facility supports Open Access publishing efforts, as it requires access to full text of documents and the lifting of restrictions in order to show figures in the search interface

Environmental metabolomics : databases and tools for data analysis

© The Author(s), 2015. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Marine Chemistry 177 (2015): 366–373, doi:10.1016/j.marchem.2015.06.012.Metabolomics is the study of small molecules, or ‘metabolites’, that are the end products of biological processes. While -omics technologies such as genomics, transcriptomics, and proteomics measure the metabolic potential of organisms, metabolomics provides detailed information on the organic compounds produced during metabolism and found within cells and in the environment. Improvements in analytical techniques have expanded our understanding of metabolomics and developments in computational tools have made metabolomics data accessible to a broad segment of the scientific community. Yet, metabolomics methods have only been applied to a limited number of projects in the marine environment. Here, we review analysis techniques for mass spectrometry data and summarize the current state of metabolomics databases. We then describe a boutique database developed in our laboratory for efficient data analysis and selection of mass spectral targets for metabolite identification. The code to implement the database is freely available on GitHub (https://github.com/joefutrelle/domdb). Data organization and analysis are critical, but often under-appreciated, components of metabolomics research. Future advances in environmental metabolomics will take advantage of continued development of new tools that facilitate analysis of large metabolomics datasets.The field data populating the database comes from scientific cruises funded by grants from the National Science Foundation to EBK and KL (Atlantic Ocean, OCE-1154320) and E.V. Armbrust (Pacific Ocean, OCE-1205233). The laboratory experiment with coastal seawater was funded by a grant from the Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative to EBK and H.K. White. The laboratory experiments with microbial isolates and the database development are funded by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation through Grant GBMF3304 to EBK