The ADA Amendments Act of 2008

The goal of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was to create a civil rights law protecting people with disabilities from discrimination on the basis of their disabilities. Disability rights advocates in 1990 were victorious in their efforts to open doors for people with disabilities and to change the country\u27s outlook and acceptance of people with disabilities. These advocates believed that the terms of the ADA, based as they were on Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, combined with the legislative history of the ADA, would provide clear instructions to the courts that the ADA was intended to provide broad coverage prohibiting discrimination against people with a wide range of physical and mental impairments. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court--with lower courts following in its lead, barricaded the door that the ADA had opened by interpreting the definition of disability in the ADA to create an overly demanding standard for coverage under the law. This article provides an overview of the advocacy effort that has resulted in restoring the original intent of the ADA and destroying the barriers of discrimination that prevent people with disabilities from fully participating in society

User contribution measurement model for web-based discussion forums

The success of social software depends on contributions made by two key entities; the infrastructure provider(s) and the content providers (users). Currently, social software providers do not possess a powerful and generic approach to measure the contributions of their users. The ability of measuring user contributions will allow social software providers to accurately identify, acknowledge and reward their content contributors. As a result, content providers may become motivated to contribute content more regularly. This paper proposes a user contribution measurement model which is validated against an operational web-based discussion forum

Content quality assessment related frameworks for social media

The assessment of content quality (CQ) in social media adds a layer of complexity over traditional information quality assessment frameworks. Challenges arise in accurately evaluating the quality of content that has been created by users from different backgrounds, for different domains and consumed by users with different requirements. This paper presents a comprehensive review of 19 existing CQ assessment related frameworks for social media in addition to proposing directions for framework improvements

Web Spambot Detection Based on Web Navigation Behaviour

Web robots have been widely used for various beneficial and malicious activities. Web spambots are a type of web robot that spreads spam content throughout the web by typically targeting Web 2.0 applications. They are intelligently designed to replicate human behaviour in order to bypass system checks. Spam content not only wastes valuable resources but can also mislead users to unsolicited websites and award undeserved search engine rankings to spammers' campaign websites. While most of the research in anti-spam filtering focuses on the identification of spam content on the web, only a few have investigated the origin of spam content, hence identification and detection of web spambots still remains an open area of research.In this paper, we describe an automated supervised machine learning solution which utilises web navigation behaviour to detect web spambots. We propose a new feature set (referred to as an action set) as a representation of user behaviour to differentiate web spambots from human users. Our experimental results show that our solution achieves a 96.24% accuracy in classifying web spambots

Assessing Post Usage for Measuring the Quality of Forum Posts

It has become difficult to discover quality content within forums websites due to the increasing amount of UserGenerated Content (UGC) on the Web. Many existing websites have relied on their users to explicitly rate content quality. The main problem with this approach is that the majority of content often receives insufficient rating. Current automated content rating solutions have evaluated linguistic features of UGC but are less effective for different types of online communities. We propose a novel approach that assesses post usage to measure the quality of forum posts. Post usage can be viewed as implicit user ratings derived from their usage behaviour. The proposed model is validated against an operational forum using Matthews Correlation Coefficient to measure performance. Our model serves as a basis of exploring content usage to measure content quality in forums and other Web 2.0 platforms

Editorial-The 6th International Workshop on Modeling the Ocean (IWMO 2014)

The 6th International Workshop on Modeling the Ocean (IWMO 2014) was held on June 23–27, 2014, at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. After three meetings in Asia (Oey et al. 2010, 2013a, b) and one in Europe (Berntsen et al. 2014), the IWMO returned to North America for the second time (since IWMO 2010 in the USA; Ezer et al. 2011). Readers are referred to https://www.dal.ca/sites/iwmo. html for more information on IWMO 2014 and http://www. ccpo.odu.edu/POMWEB /meetings.htm for information on the past meetings and future planned meetings

Optometric extension program: 1991 bibliography of near lenses and vision training research

Optometric extension program: 1991 bibliography of near lenses and vision training researc

Solar Chromospheric Temperature Diagnostics: a joint ALMA-Hα\alpha analysis

We present the first high-resolution, simultaneous observations of the solar chromosphere in the optical and millimeter wavelength ranges, obtained with ALMA and the IBIS instrument at the Dunn Solar Telescope. In this paper we concentrate on the comparison between the brightness temperature observed in ALMA Band 3 (3 mm; 100 GHz) and the core width of the H$\alpha$ 656.3 nm line, previously identified as a possible diagnostic of the chromospheric temperature. We find that in the area of plage, network and fibrils covered by our FOV the two diagnostics are well correlated, with similar spatial structures observed in both. The strength of the correlation is remarkable, given that the source function of the mm-radiation obeys local thermodynamic equilibrium, while the H$\alpha$ line has a source function that deviates significantly from the local Planck function. The observed range of ALMA brightness temperatures is sensibly smaller than the temperature range that was previously invoked to explain the observed width variations in H$\alpha$. We employ analysis from forward modeling with the RH code to argue that the strong correlation between H$\alpha$ width and ALMA brightness temperature is caused by their shared dependence on the population number $n_2$ of the first excited level of hydrogen. This population number drives millimeter opacity through hydrogen ionization via the Balmer continuum, and H$\alpha$ width through a curve-of-growth-like opacity effect. Ultimately, the $n_2$ population is regulated by the enhancement or lack of downward Ly$\alpha$ flux, which coherently shifts the formation height of both diagnostics to regions with different temperature, respectively.Comment: Accepted for publication in Ap

Estimation of outcrossing rates in Koompassia malaccensts from an open-pollinated population in Peninsular Malaysia using microsatellite markers

Koompassia malaccensis (Leguminosae), locally known as kempas, is an important tropical timber species in South-East Asia. Although studies have shown that most tropical tree species are predominantly outcrossing, there is no empirical support for this species prior to this study, with regard to its mating system. Information on its reproductive biology is also scanty. We report the estimation of the outcrossing rates of K. malaccensis using microsatellite markers, based on a fruiting season at the Semangkok Forest Reserve, Selangor. Microsatellite analysis was performed for an average of 46 seeds each from nine adult K. malaccensis trees, using four polymorphic microsatellite loci (Kma050, Kma067, Kma147 and Kma180). Single and multilocus population outcrossing estimates (ts and tm respectively) were determined using the software MLTR version 3.0. Results showed that this timber species was predominantly outcrossing (tm = 0.890). Biparental mating (tm – ts) was very low, only 0.026, suggesting low tendency of mating between relatives. Outcrossing estimates obtained for individual mother trees were in the range of 0.637 to 0.994. The relatively lower outcrossing rates exhibited by a few progeny arrays indicated that K. malaccensis was not completely self-incompatible

The Twittering Presidents An analysis of tweets from @BarackObama and @realDonaldTrump

This paper uses a Systemic Functional Multimodal Discourse Analysis (SF-MDA) approach to analyse tweets from the Twitter accounts of Presidents Barack Obama (@Barack Obama) and Donald Trump (@realDonaldTrump). The tweets were posted during the last nine months of President Obama’s effective presidency and the first nine months of President Trump’s presidency. The tweets are analysed using automated text analysis which is interpreted through an SF-MDA lens, supplemented by manual analysis. The analysis examines ideational and interpersonal emphasis in the tweets with the aim of showing how the composition and content construct a view of how each president and his presidency are presented to the public. The findings suggest marked contrasts in presidential style with President Trump foregrounding the interpersonal while President Obama foregrounds the ideational. Where President Trump presents as self-promoting, autocratic, opinionated and igniting discord in his tweets, President Obama presents as democratic, moderate, restrained and seeking social harmony