Child Pornography and Child Sexual Abuse in the 21st Century: A Critical Overview of the Technological Shifts in Distribution, the Academic Literature, and the Current Re-Entry Policies for Convicts of these Crimes

This capstone project focuses on four distinct but interrelated papers. The first details the role of technology in creating a resurgence of child pornography and how both the authorities and corporations have responded to this phenomenon. The second paper provides a literature review on research assessing the amount of child pornography consumers who victimize children. The third work is my own original research on the topic explored in the second paper. The fourth and final paper explains the post-incarceration consequences child pornography possessors often encounter and how they reintegrate into society, in addition to assessing the flaws and successes of these approaches. The overarching theme of this capstone project is to detail why this topic is a major concern and not a single criminal justice problem. By describing how child pornography rose to prominence in the 21st century as a major criminal justice concern, why there is more to the issue than the production, distribution, and consumption of child pornography, and the current approaches to preventing these individuals from reoffending after their release from prison, I aim to provide the reader with an understanding of how the consumption of child pornography is a major issue and how the United States can implement more robust approaches to assessing and confronting it

ARAS: an automated radioactivity aliquoting system for dispensing solutions containing positron-emitting radioisotopes.

BackgroundAutomated protocols for measuring and dispensing solutions containing radioisotopes are essential not only for providing a safe environment for radiation workers but also to ensure accuracy of dispensed radioactivity and an efficient workflow. For this purpose, we have designed ARAS, an automated radioactivity aliquoting system for dispensing solutions containing positron-emitting radioisotopes with particular focus on fluorine-18 ((18)F).MethodsThe key to the system is the combination of a radiation detector measuring radioactivity concentration, in line with a peristaltic pump dispensing known volumes.ResultsThe combined system demonstrates volume variation to be within 5 % for dispensing volumes of 20 μL or greater. When considering volumes of 20 μL or greater, the delivered radioactivity is in agreement with the requested amount as measured independently with a dose calibrator to within 2 % on average.ConclusionsThe integration of the detector and pump in an in-line system leads to a flexible and compact approach that can accurately dispense solutions containing radioactivity concentrations ranging from the high values typical of [(18)F]fluoride directly produced from a cyclotron (~0.1-1 mCi μL(-1)) to the low values typical of batches of [(18)F]fluoride-labeled radiotracers intended for preclinical mouse scans (~1-10 μCi μL(-1))

Compacting XML Structures Using a Dynamic Labeling Scheme

Abstract. Due to the growing popularity of XML as a data exchange and storage format, the need to develop efficient techniques for stor-ing and querying XML documents has emerged. A common approach to achieve this is to use labeling techniques. However, their main prob-lem is that they either do not support updating XML data dynamically or impose huge storage requirements. On the other hand, with the ver-bosity and redundancy problem of XML, which can lead to increased cost for processing XML documents, compaction of XML documents has be-come an increasingly important research issue. In this paper, we propose an approach called CXDLS combining the strengths of both, labeling and compaction techniques. Our approach exploits repetitive consecu-tive subtrees and tags for compacting the structure of XML documents by taking advantage of the ORDPATH labeling scheme. In addition it stores the compacted structure and the data values separately. Using our proposed approach, it is possible to support efficient query and update processing on compacted XML documents and to reduce storage space dramatically. Results of a comprehensive performance study are provided to show the advantages of CXDLS.

Quantitative assessments of glycolysis from single cells

The most common positron emission tomography (PET) radio-labeled probe for molecular diagnostics in patient care and research is the glucose analog, 2-deoxy-2-[F-18]fluoro-D-glucose (^(18)F-FDG). We report on an integrated microfluidics-chip/beta particle imaging system for in vitro ^(18)F-FDG radioassays of glycolysis with single cell resolution. We investigated the kinetic responses of single glioblastoma cancer cells to targeted inhibitors of receptor tyrosine kinase signaling. Further, we find a weak positive correlation between cell size and rate of glycolysis

The Repeatability Experiment of SIGMOD 2008

SIGMOD 2008 was the first database conference that offered to test submitters' programs against their data to verify the experiments published. This paper discusses the rationale for this effort, the community's reaction, our experiences, and advice for future similar efforts