Latent Semantic Indexing in the Discovery of Cyber-bullying in Online Text

The rise in the use of social media and particularly the rise of adolescent use has led to a new means of bullying. Cyber-bullying has proven consequential to youth internet users causing a need for a response. In order to effectively stop this problem we need a verified method of detecting cyber-bullying in online text; we aim to find that method. For this project we look at thirteen thousand labeled posts from Formspring and create a bank of words used in the posts. First the posts are cleaned up by taking out punctuation, normalizing emoticons, and removing high and low frequency words. Due to the nature of online text many of the words are misspelled either purposefully or unintentionally so a spell check software is used to check the vocabulary, ensuring spelling variations are accounted for. Using this word bank we create a term by document matrix with each post being its own document. By implementing Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) a query can be placed to the matrix for posts that could have cyber-bullying content. Then the algorithm is trained by adjusting our methods to clean posts and revising spelling corrections for particular repetitive words. With an established approach to pruning the word bank we test our LSI algorithm on other data sets

Toward Analog Quantum Computing: Simulating Designer Atomic Systems

We use a magneto-optical trap to cool rubidium atoms to temperatures in the µK range. On the µs timescales of our experiment, the atoms are moving slowly enough that they appear stationary. We then excite them to a Rydberg state, where the outer electron is loosely bound. In these high energy states, the atoms can exchange energy with each other. Since the energy exchange depends on the separation and the relative orientation of the atoms, we can potentially control their interactions by controlling the spatial arrangements of the atoms. We model this system using simulations on a supercomputer and look for opportunities to control the energy exchange by manipulating the geometry. We present results that could be applicable for quantum information processing

Toward Quantum Analog Computing: Simulating Designer Atomic Systems

We use a magneto-optical trap to cool rubidium atoms to temperatures in the µK range. On the µs timescales of our experiment, the atoms are moving slowly enough that they appear stationary. We then excite them to a Rydberg state, where the outer electron is loosely bound. In these high energy states, the atoms can exchange energy with each other. Since the energy exchange depends on the separation and the relative orientation of the atoms, we can potentially control their interactions by controlling the spatial arrangements of the atoms. We model this system using simulations on a supercomputer and look for opportunities to control the energy exchange by manipulating the geometry. We present results that could be applicable for quantum information processing

Simulations of the angular dependence of the dipole-dipole interaction among Rydberg atoms

The dipole-dipole interaction between two Rydberg atoms depends on the relative orientation of the atoms and on the change in the magnetic quantum number. We simulate the effect of this anisotropy on the energy transport in an amorphous many atom system subject to a homogeneous applied electric field. We consider two experimentally feasible geometries and find that the effects should be measurable in current generation imaging experiments. In both geometries atoms of $p$ character are localized to a small region of space which is immersed in a larger region that is filled with atoms of $s$ character. Energy transfer due to the dipole-dipole interaction can lead to a spread of $p$ character into the region initially occupied by $s$ atoms. Over long timescales the energy transport is confined to the volume near the border of the $p$ region which is suggestive of Anderson localization. We calculate a correlation length of 6.3~$\mu$m for one particular geometry.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures, revised draf

Low back pain in Hispanic residential carpenters

Low back pain (LBP) is a leading cause of lost work time and has been recognized as America’s number one workplace safety challenge. Low back pain is occurring at epidemic proportions among construction workers, and minority populations have been under-investigated for risk of back injury. This project investigated the multiple potential risk factors for occupational LBP among Hispanic residential carpenters