From the Land of Genesis

The narrative of the Combat veteran from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars over the past decade has been largely obscured. This is in part due to lack of media attention and partly to a nation-wide numbness to the prolonged conflict, but also due to a lack of creative publication. Plenty of reporters have published journalistic accounts of events or experiences, and several veterans themselves have published first-hand memoirs of their tours—but there is still no literary publication to represent the conflict for the general public. Through the hundreds of sources we have gathered (from scholarly studies and news articles to journals and blog posts), as well as our interviews with combat veterans, I have developed a series of short stories that represent the experiences and themes of the soldiers who have fought for our nation in its most recent wars. These stories, while independent, depict a large scope of the combat and experiences through an interconnected web of scenes and characters in the structure of a short story cycle (similar to Dubliners by James Joyce, or In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway). They also aim to contribute to the evolving style of war narratives following Tim O’Brien and Anthony Swafford. Through this project, I hope to reach the general public in an attempt to spread awareness of the experiences of our soldiers over seas—to tell their stories in a style and medium that will encourage people to listen

Eye Movement Control: An Index for Athleticism

Athletic potential is one of the most complex human traits. An elite athlete is produced from a complex interaction of an innumerable number of traits exhibited by the athlete. However, it’s not clear whether these traits are innate, allowing the athlete to excel, or, alternatively, are a consequence of practice. To be successful, athletes rely heavily on sensory information from the visual and vestibular systems. This study investigated the relationship eye movement control has with innate athleticism by comparing the saccadic and Vestibulo-Ocular Reflex (VOR) responses of former, no longer practicing, elite athletes against their age and gender matched counterparts who were non-elite or non-athletes. Results showed subjects who participated in athletic activities longer (regardless of type or level achieved), showed both significantly better VOR suppression capabilities, as well as higher head velocities while suppressing their VOR. Although, these results are correlative in nature, they do not support the potential that VOR suppression is a learned trait of athletes. A longitudinal study would be required to assess this relationship fully

Supporting research studies to booster flight control problems Final report

Asymptotic stability and response of nonlinear system

Automated Deception Detection of Males and Females From Non-Verbal Facial Micro-Gestures

Gender bias within Artificial intelligence driven systems is currently a hot topic and is one of a number of areas where the data used to train, validate and test machine learning algorithms is under more scrutiny than ever before. In this paper we investigate if there is a difference between the nonverbal cues to deception generated by males and females through the use of an automated deception detection system. The system uses hierarchical neural networks to extract 36 channels of non-verbal head and facial behaviors whilst male and female participants are engaged in either a deceptive or truthful roleplaying task. An Image Vector dataset, comprising of 86584 vectors, is collated which uses a fixed sliding window slot of 1 second to record deceptive or truthful slots. Experiments were conducted on three variants of the dataset, all males, all females and mixed in order to examine if the differences in cues generated by males and females lead to differences in the accuracies of machine learning algorithms which classify their behavior. Results showed differences in nonverbal cues between males and females, with both genders at a disadvantage when treated by classifiers trained on both genders rather than classifiers specifically trained for each gender. However, there was no striking disadvantageous effect beyond the influence of their relative frequency of occurrence in the dataset

E-DPNCT: An Enhanced Attack Resilient Differential Privacy Model For Smart Grids Using Split Noise Cancellation

High frequency reporting of energy utilization data in smart grids can be used to infer sensitive information regarding the consumer's life style. We propose A Differential Private Noise Cancellation Model for Load Monitoring and Billing for Smart Meters (DPNCT) to protect the privacy of the smart grid data using noise cancellation protocol with a master smart meter to provide accurate billing and load monitoring. Next, we evaluate the performance of DPNCT under various privacy attacks such as filtering attack, negative noise cancellation attack and collusion attack. The DPNCT model relies on trusted master smart meters and is vulnerable to collusion attack where adversary collude with malicious smart meters in order to get private information of other smart meters. In this paper, we propose an Enhanced DPNCT (E-DPNCT) where we use multiple master smart meters for split noise at each instant in time t for better protection against collusion attack. We did extensive comparison of our E-DPNCT model with state of the art attack resistant privacy preserving models such as EPIC for collision attack and with Barbosa Differentialy Private (BDP) model for filtering attack. We evaluate our E-DPNCT model with real time data which shows significant improvement in privacy attack scenarios without any compute intensive operations.Comment: 10 pages, 12 figues, 4 table

Purposeless Restraints: Fourteenth Amendment Rationality Scrutiny and the Constitutional Review of Prison Sentences

This Article presents an analysis and defense of the Supreme Court\u27s current Eighth Amendment case law on prison sentencing. I argue that in the pivotal cases of Ewing v. California and Harmelin v. Michigan, a plurality of the Supreme Court has assimilated Eighth Amendment review of individual prison sentences to rationality review of state action under the Fourteenth Amendment\u27s due process clause. When the cases are read rightly, it becomes clear that Eighth Amendment review does not really ask whether a sentence is grossly disproportionate, as the Court has asserted; rather, it seeks to identify arbitrary and capricious prison sentences that suggest a procedural defect in the sentencing process. I defend this doctrine on the grounds of original understanding, stare decisis, neutral interpretation, and normative federalism values. Finally, I show how an interpretation of Eighth Amendment prison sentencing review as rationality review can be squared with the Supreme Court\u27s decisions involving constitutional proportionality review of other noncapital sanctions such as fines, punitive damages, and conditions of confinement

Elevated temperature stress corrosion of high strength sheet materials in the presence of stress concentrations Final report

High temperature stress corrosion of titanium and titanium alloy

The Convergence of Quality and Digitalisation in a Changing World: Implications for Developing Nations such as the BRICS Group

The emergence of digitalisation and the Fourth Industrial Revolution has resulted in a significant shift in practices, resulting in a disconnection among organisations, employees, and technology, particularly affecting developing nations like the BRICS group which have faced disproportionate challenges due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The aim of this paper is to explore the role of quality in the context of intelligent and automated systems operating in a technologically advanced environment. The study employs a systematic literature review methodology, which encompassed a rigorous process of identifying and selecting 38 articles, followed by a comprehensive thematic analysis. The findings highlight that organisations need to adapt their quality systems to effectively operate in a world dominated by intelligent and automated systems. The implication is that by leveraging digital technologies, organisations can embrace the integration of quality with machine learning, programmable logic controllers, adaptive feedback loops, automated information collection, and blockchain technology to develop a value-based, transparent, and secure quality system. The proposed roadmap and model derived from this study affords organisations the opportunity to establish an intelligent quality ecosystem that aptly aligns with the requisites of the technologically advanced era, thereby ensuring the attainment of excellence in quality during the digital era