The factors that influence the adoption or non-adoption of information and communications technologies (ICTs) by recently-arrived immigrants in the Wellington Region : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Business Information at Massey University

The purpose of this qualitative study was to better understand recent immigrants' perceptions of ICTs, what causes them to adopt or not adopt ICTs, and the factors that influence such action. A self-selected, volunteer sample of 32 recent immigrants living in 15 households, between the ages of 12 - 65 and who came from developing countries that include Africa (5), the Middle East (4), Central Asia (3) and South East Asia (2) participated in the research. The Refugee and Migrants' Service (RMS), Wellington branch, and ethnic community leaders supported the study and introduced the researcher to potential participants. Two rounds of semi-structured, in-depth audio-taped interviews were held in the immigrants' own homes. The aim of the first round of interviews was to establish trust with the volunteers. The second round of interviews occurred six weeks later. The follow-up interviews provided an opportunity for both the researcher and the participants to validate the transcribed interviews as well as allowing further discussion on their ICT adoption. The majority of participants interviewed had a positive attitude towards ICTs. They viewed the technology as a useful tool because they saw relative- advantage benefits such as accomplishing tasks more easily, saving money on communication and finding employment. A priority on home access was evident for nearly half the interviewees who owned their computers (despite participants being low-waged and some unemployed). The major method of adoption for the immigrants who were new to computing was via friends and family. The personal one-to-one teaching, in a safe, relaxed environment was important to many migrants, as was the timeliness of the teaching. Overall, the results show that young, male participants with a relatively higher educational background were more likely to be adopters. In contrast, older female participants with little or no education were less likely to participate in ICTs. The results also show that the majority of the participants lacked computing experience. This study was exploratory in nature, therefore there is opportunity for researchers interested in understanding ICTs adoption to build on these research findings and explore in greater detail a range of factors that influence recent immigrants' adoption or non adoption of ICTs. The findings have important implication for policy makers and practitioners who wish to create an inclusive society where all members, including recent immigrants, are able to access and use ICTs and hence be able to fully participate in the information society. Recommendations, based on the study's findings, include suggestions to promote ICTs among recently-arrived immigrants community

Interface Development for Digitization of Documents Using OCR

The purpose of this thesis is to develop a semi-automated interface that uses Optical Character Recognition (OCR) routines to identify text-based information from a large volume of digitized drawings associated with the oil and gas industry. The identified information is presented in an appropriate interface for any necessary manual modifica- tion, with the target of improving the efficiency of maintaining large amounts of older documents. The thesis outlines the design of the interface and the implementation of Tesseract OCR engine, in combination with tailor-made functions and classes that lever- age OpenCV to enhance the recognition process.The purpose of this thesis is to develop a semi-automated interface that uses Optical Character Recognition (OCR) routines to identify text-based information from a large volume of digitized drawings associated with the oil and gas industry. The identified information is presented in an appropriate interface for any necessary manual modifica- tion, with the target of improving the efficiency of maintaining large amounts of older documents. The thesis outlines the design of the interface and the implementation of Tesseract OCR engine, in combination with tailor-made functions and classes that lever- age OpenCV to enhance the recognition process

Interface Development for Digitization of Documents Using OCR

The purpose of this thesis is to develop a semi-automated interface that uses Optical Character Recognition (OCR) routines to identify text-based information from a large volume of digitized drawings associated with the oil and gas industry. The identified information is presented in an appropriate interface for any necessary manual modification, with the target of improving the efficiency of maintaining large amounts of older documents. The thesis outlines the design of the interface and the implementation of Tesseract OCR engine, in combination with tailor-made functions and classes that leverage OpenCV to enhance the recognition processThe purpose of this thesis is to develop a semi-automated interface that uses Optical Character Recognition (OCR) routines to identify text-based information from a large volume of digitized drawings associated with the oil and gas industry. The identified information is presented in an appropriate interface for any necessary manual modification, with the target of improving the efficiency of maintaining large amounts of older documents. The thesis outlines the design of the interface and the implementation of Tesseract OCR engine, in combination with tailor-made functions and classes that leverage OpenCV to enhance the recognition proces

Osteoporosis in rheumatoid arthritis

Department of Internal Medicine Rheumatology and Nephrology, Nicolae Testemitanu State University of Medicine and Pharmacy, Chisinau, Republic of Moldova, The 8th International Medical Congress for Students and Young Doctors, September 24-26, 2020Introduction. Osteoporosis is a disease where bones lose their bone mineral density (BMD) which causes bone fragility and leads to fractures, Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is an autoimmune inflammatory disease that affects the joints symmetrically and is known to cause secondary osteoporosis Aim of the study. To study literatures that focus on the risk factors of osteoporosis and the correlation between it and rheumatoid arthritis. Materials and methods. A literature search using, PubMed, Medscape and the national scientific information archive was performed. among the most relevant articles we selected 70, the data were analyzed by content structure and summarized,as well as statistical analysis where possible. Results. In patients with RA four biomarkers are found to predict fracture sites, Tartrateresistant acid phosphate 5b (TRACP-5b), undercarboxynated osteocalcin (Uc-OC) and bone specific alkaline phosphate (BAP) are able to realize both BMD and bone quality while homocysteine is able to realize only bone quality, In RA patients annual bone mineral density changes are 0.14 + 2.70 in lumbar spine, 0.46 + in proximal hip and 1.14 + 1.85 in forearm. Some studies show that in lumbar spine Homocysteine is the significant predictor for fractures, while in the proximal hip and forearm homocysteine does not have any significance. The most potent predictors for hip and forearm fractures are DAS28-ESR, blood pressure and Vitamin D levels other authors consider a better predictor to be ACPA and Methotrexate dosage use. Another hypothesis suggests that mycobacterium Avium Paratuberculosis (MAP) infection associated with TNF polymorphisms in patients with rheumatoid arthritis might cause secondary osteoporosis and it was found that the association between MAP infection in patients with rheumatoid arthritis and a risk for development of osteoporosis. Conclusions. Osteoporosis is a common condition diagnosed in patients with RA. Secondary osteoporosis due to RA depends on the disease activity, ACPA level, MTX dosage. Some biochemical markers, as homocysteine, TRACP-5b, Uc-OC and bone specific alkaline phosphate can serve as predictors for osteoporotic fractures at different sites

Business Ethics, Corporate Social Responsibility, and Firm Value in the Oil and Gas Industry

This study investigated the relationship between ethical performance, corporate social responsibility, and firm value in companies in the oil and gas industry. Ethical behavior and social responsibility were conceptualized by a series of social indexes used to carry out empirical observations. The data were collected from a sample of 55 companies drawn from the population of companies in the oil and gas industry and consisting of public documents, including proceedings of government bodies and court records, and newspapers and magazines dated from January 2000 through December 2003. The set of social indexes was analyzed statistically to establish any significant relationship with the firm\u27s value. The results indicated that ethical performance was positively and significantly correlated with firm value, as measured by return on equity in the exploration and production sector of the industry. In addition, diversity was positively and significantly correlated with firm value, as measured by approximate Tobin\u27s Q ratio in the equipment and services sector. The results of the study corroborated the economic importance of managers leading a socially responsible business operation by aggressively pursuing in their companies goals of zero emissions, zero environmental damage incidents, increased diversity in the workplace, and zero incidents of unethical behavior

The impact of Rayleigh fading channel effects on the RF-DNA fingerprinting process

The Internet of Things (IoT) consists of many electronic and electromechanical devices connected to the Internet. It is estimated that the number of connected IoT devices will be between 20 and 50 billion by the year 2020. The need for mechanisms to secure IoT networks will increase dramatically as 70% of the edge devices have no encryption. Previous research has proposed RF-DNA fingerprinting to provide wireless network access security through the exploitation of PHY layer features. RF-DNA fingerprinting takes advantage of unique and distinct characteristics that unintentionally occur within a given radio’s transmit chain during waveform generation. In this work, the application of RF-DNA fingerprinting is extended by developing a Nelder-Mead-based algorithm that estimates the coefficients of an indoor Rayleigh fading channel. The performance of the Nelder-Mead estimator is compared to the Least Square estimator and is assessed with degrading signal-to-noise ratio. The Rayleigh channel coefficients set estimated by the Nelder-Mead estimator is used to remove the multipath channel effects from the radio signal. The resulting channel-compensated signal is the region where the RF-DNA fingerprints are generated and classified. For a signal-to-noise ratio greater than 21 decibels, an average percent correct classification of more than 95% was achieved in a two-reflector channel

Preprint: Using RF-DNA Fingerprints To Classify OFDM Transmitters Under Rayleigh Fading Conditions

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a collection of Internet connected devices capable of interacting with the physical world and computer systems. It is estimated that the IoT will consist of approximately fifty billion devices by the year 2020. In addition to the sheer numbers, the need for IoT security is exacerbated by the fact that many of the edge devices employ weak to no encryption of the communication link. It has been estimated that almost 70% of IoT devices use no form of encryption. Previous research has suggested the use of Specific Emitter Identification (SEI), a physical layer technique, as a means of augmenting bit-level security mechanism such as encryption. The work presented here integrates a Nelder-Mead based approach for estimating the Rayleigh fading channel coefficients prior to the SEI approach known as RF-DNA fingerprinting. The performance of this estimator is assessed for degrading signal-to-noise ratio and compared with least square and minimum mean squared error channel estimators. Additionally, this work presents classification results using RF-DNA fingerprints that were extracted from received signals that have undergone Rayleigh fading channel correction using Minimum Mean Squared Error (MMSE) equalization. This work also performs radio discrimination using RF-DNA fingerprints generated from the normalized magnitude-squared and phase response of Gabor coefficients as well as two classifiers. Discrimination of four 802.11a Wi-Fi radios achieves an average percent correct classification of 90% or better for signal-to-noise ratios of 18 and 21 dB or greater using a Rayleigh fading channel comprised of two and five paths, respectively.Comment: 13 pages, 14 total figures/images, Currently under review by the IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Securit

Stratum

My work is an expression of the relationship between my own culture, and the American culture and way of life that I have had a chance to interact with, observe, and reflect on throughout the past few years. My concepts were inspired by the industrial nature of the area that I live in, where I gradually realized that I was surrounded by dozens of workshops and garages. Given that my home is the spiritually-rich, fairly traditional, and non-industrial Saudi Arabia, this typical American experience has been, to me, one with much room for reflection, due to the extreme contrast. The abundance of home improvement and hardware stores in the vicinity further provided me with unprecedented, convenient access to tools and supplies that sometimes I did not even know existed, which eliminated a significant barrier that had previously affected my ability to engage in actual craft, and provided inspiration and motivation to create. In this new reality, I could envision any work, and likely figure out a reasonable means to make it come to life. My art is communication between both my Saudi and American experiences, where my professional background as a graphic designer interplays with my more recent drive to explore my relationship with Art, which I pursue here in Southern California. Patterns are a life-long fascination of mine, they give me peace and bring to my mind spirituality and meditation. I view them as words and phrases that could be read and translated to a universal language. However, I find pleasure in deconstructing these patterns and creating new visual boundaries. As such, my work transforms traditional, decorative Islamic patterns that are both ancient and stable into contemporary, industrial sculptures. My genuine interest in traditions and cultures leads me to subconsciously communicate with them. In my work, I attempt to examine tradition and challenge our perception of traditions through cultural symbols

The Dynamic Recording of Occlusal Forces Related to Mandibular Movement and Masseter Muscle Activity in Implant Stabilised Overdenture Wearers

PhDThe initial phase of this study was to develop a force transducer to investigate occlusal forces during the process of mastication. The strain gauge transducer was designed to attach to an Astra implant. A commercial pressure transducer was also used under one distal saddle of the denture. The calibration method was designed to record unilateral masticatory forces regardless of the site of loading. Five edentulous subjects with implant stabilised mandibular overdentures and maxillary complete dentures were selected for the study. Mandibular movements and unilateral Masseter muscle EMG were recorded. Experiments were designed to establish within subject differences related to cycle type, food type, EMG-force relationship, chewing side and cycle phase. Maximum biting force on a bite gauge and in the intercuspal position were also recorded. Details of force production during the closing and occlusal phases improved the description of the movement cycle and it's relationship to food breakdown. A classification of chewing cycles is proposed based on the force exerted in the closing and occlusal phases. This provides objective criteria for separating crushing, reduction and mush cycles. Peak forces varied between subjects, but are characteristic for the type of food within subjects. The different strategies used by subjects appeared to be partly related to the force capacity of the individual. The duration of force in the closing phase was related to the stage in the chewing sequence and indicated the degree of bolus resistance. A longer force duration in the closing phase was usually accompanied by a shorter occlusal duration and consequently an early occurrence of force peak relative to occlusion. The progressive change of jaw gap at the beginning of force was consistent with the expected reduction of particles through the masticatory sequence. The jaw gape at maximum velocity correlated with maximum jaw gape but both did not decrease progressively 2 Abstract through chewing sequences. Conversely, the jaw gape at which force exceeded 5N showed patterns of progressive decrease especially with frangible foods. Integrated force and Emg showed high correlations during mastication, better than peak values. These correlations were, however, weaker than those found in static unilateral biting. The slope difference found between the two conditions contraindicate the use of Emg activity in static unilateral biting as an index for measuring masticatory forces. This study has, thus, validated a method for investigating masticatory forces and shown their value for analysis of dynamic aspects of the loads that occurs during mastication

Modeling end-user adoption of e-government services in Abu Dhabi

A number of recent reports indicate that many governments around the world are increasingly using internet technologies to provide public services. However little is known about the factors that influence end-users’ adoption of these services, particularly in a non-western context. This study used mixed research methods to build, empirically test and validate an e-government adoption model. The findings will be useful to both e-government researchers and practitioners interested in promoting e-government