Early voting in the 2004 presidential election

The addition of early voting laws has led to the many changes in the US political system. In this dissertation I examine early voting early voting in a number of different contexts. First, how early voting fits in with the larger issue of voter turnout in the U.S. Second, why some states have early voting policies and other states choose to not have those policies. Third, how state-level political parties view the option to cast an early vote. Fourth, the differences between early voters, election day voters, and non-voters. Fifth, what are the determents of casting an early ballot. Sixth, do early voting laws lead to more electoral participation. My findings suggest that early voting does not significantly change the way in which state-level political parties get people to the polls, early voters are different from election day voters, and that early voting policies significantly increase overall participation by 2% points. Early voting changes the way citizens participate in elections and this dissertation provides an early view of how this new mode of participation changes the political behavior in different electoral area

Survey on Cardiotocography Feature Extraction Algorithms for Foetal Welfare Assessment

The original version of this chapter was inadvertently published with an incorrect chapter pagination 1187–1192 and DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-32703-7_230. The page range and the DOI has been re-assigned. The correct page range is 1193–1198 and the DOI is 10.1007/978-3-319-32703-7_231. The erratum to this chapter is available at DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-32703-7_260 An erratum to this chapter can be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32703-7_260 An erratum to this chapter can be found at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32703-7_260Since its inception forty years ago as a way to control birth process, the cardiotocograph (CTG) has emerged over time and became the undisputed leader worldwide of non-invasive intrapartum foetal monitoring systems. The CTG signals conveying a lot of information, it is very difficult to interpret them and act accordingly even for specialists; hence, researchers have started looking for characteristics which could be correlated with a particular pathological state of the foetus. Thereby, many features appeared in the literature, ranging from the most common ones to artificially generated features, and computed using a wide variety of signal processing-based analysis tools: time scale, spectral or non-linear analysis, to name but a few. This survey paper, presents in a hierarchical order the most common processing steps of a CTG signal and focuses primarily on the feature extraction methods for foetal heart rate (FHR) analysis reported in the literature during the last decade. Also, some feature classification methods are reported before a brief discussion which concludes this work