An Exceptional Story

The temperature was more than 90 degrees Fahrenheit as I lay on my keister in the shade of an oak tree relaxing at the babbling weir of Anaheim Creek. My enjoyment was enhanced by several heirfers stopping to drink, and a skein of ducks flying at a considerable height above the forest. The event was a nonpareil leisure occurrence

Ants Are All Over

This is a story of an enchanting young man, Anthony Santiago, an immigrant from Antwerp, who became a very important contributor to our society as a result of his penchant for inventions. He was responsible for the development. He created a safety lantern for use in anthracite mines, a sextant that received world-wide acclaim, and he helped perfect a disinfectant for commercial use

California Wildfires, Land Erosion, and the Effects on Ranchers and Farmers

This project is about assessing the land erosion caused by California wildfires and how that erosion continues to affect farmers and ranchers across the state. Existing erosion assessments for northern California wildfires, through Geo-Engineering Solutions, will provide some supplemental data that can be used for the project. Watershed and erosion reports from the US Geological Survey will also be used. The Adam’s Canyon ranch in Santa Paula, California, will be used as an example since the Thomas Fire consumed the majority of the ranch and it was imperative the resulting erosion damage had to be attended to over the last couple of years. Success would entail finding out how extensive the erosion damage within California is, and concurrently, what will have to be done to prepare for future because the fires, which are predicted to become increasingly more intense. This puts ranchers and farmers at further risk than just fire damage

Scars for survival: high cost male initiation rites are strongly associated with desert habitat in Pama-Nyungan Australia

Costly ritual behaviours have frequently been of interest to evolutionary researchers seeking to understand whether they have an adaptive benefit. Here we examine the costliness of initiation rituals across a large group of hunter-gather societies in Pama-Nyungan Australia and compare these with a range of possible adaptive benefits, including warfare, food sharing, demography, and mate competition. We find that in Australia, desert habitat was mostly strongly associated with these rites. Such rites may support the collective action, such as food sharing, necessary for survival in such a precarious environment

Tradition and innovation in the traditional arts of Shandong Province, China

The paper outlines the social forces influencing continuity or innovation in the traditional arts of Shandong Province, China. These are addressed under five headings: 1. The relative flexibility of material media 2. The gender based transmission of skills (a) Male: Chayanov and craft production for the market during the slack agricultural season: Woodblock printing, toy-making, funeral models, ancestral and household shrine painting. Innovations take the form of new subjects, introduced to attract new buyers (b) Female: cotton weaving, embroidery, paper cutting. Most of the villages we’ve worked in still practice village exogamy (despite the law of 1950 banning compulsory exogamy), so that women take skills with them when they marry, whereas men’s skills remain in their village of birth. 3. Combined with the purpose of production: (a) Male arts primarily produced for market, with 100s of years of market tradition (b) Female arts primarily for domestic consumption (although surplus cotton cloth has long been traded to increase family income), among which the daughter’s trousseau is an important component. 4. Disruption caused by the mid-20th century ‘social movements’ caused an enforced break in almost all crafts. 5. The acceptability of the arts to the intended audience (new but traditional themes in toys and woodblocks), and the movement toward fine art

Online Romance Scam: Expensive e-Living for romantic happiness

The Online Romance Scam is a very successful scam which causes considerable financial and emotional damage to its victims. It is based on building a relationship which establishes a deep trust that causes victims to voluntarily transfer funds to the scammer. The aim of this research is to explore online dating scams as a type of e-Living which initially creates happiness for the victim in a virtual romantic relationship, but tragically then causes the victim to be separated from his or her savings. Using narrative research methodology, this research will establish a model of the romance scam structure and its variations regarding human romantic attitudes, and will develop a theory which explains how the victim is moved through the phases of the scam. Findings of this research will contribute to the knowledge of the Online Romance Scam as e-Crime and provide information about the structure and the development of the modus operandi which can be used to identify an online relationship as a scam at an early phase in order to prevent significant harm to the victim

Malware Detection Based on Structural and Behavioural Features of API Calls

In this paper, we propose a five-step approach to detect obfuscated malware by investigating the structural and behavioural features of API calls. We have developed a fully automated system to disassemble and extract API call features effectively from executables. Using n-gram statistical analysis of binary content, we are able to classify if an executable file is malicious or benign. Our experimental results with a dataset of 242 malwares and 72 benign files have shown a promising accuracy of 96.5% for the unigram model. We also provide a preliminary analysis by our approach using support vector machine (SVM) and by varying n-values from 1 to 5, we have analysed the performance that include accuracy, false positives and false negatives. By applying SVM, we propose to train the classifier and derive an optimum n-gram model for detecting both known and unknown malware efficiently

A gravity model distribution of truck trips in two small cities

Call number: LD2668 .T4 1965 L42Master of Scienc