The Promotion of Skin-Bleaching Products in Jamaica: Media Representation and Cultural Impact

AN ABSTRACT OF THE RESEARCH REPORT OF JESSICA EDMOND, for the Master of Science degree in MASS COMMUNICATION AND MEDIA ARTS, presented on March 31, 2014, at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. TITLE: THE PROMOTION OF SKIN BLEACHING PRODUCTS IN JAMAICA: MEDIA REPRESENTATION AND CULTURAL IMPACT MAJOR PROFESSOR: William Freivogel and Phil Greer Through television commercials, print and digital advertisements, magazines, billboards, and the internet, the ideal skin complexion represented in Jamaican media is fair-skin tones. This idea that fair skin is better is common among other cultures in the world and is spreading to developed as well as developing nations worldwide. This study looks at different literature dealing with the effects of viewing media representation among women in Jamaica. This study found that there was greater complexion dissatisfaction among darker skinned women, but there was not enough evidence to suggest that this was a direct result of consuming media representation print, audio, television, magazines, etc of the subject

Higgs Boson Production in Weak Boson Fusion at Next-to-Leading Order

The weak boson fusion process for neutral Higgs boson production is investigated with particular attention to the accuracy with which the Higgs boson coupling to weak bosons can be determined at CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) energies in final states that contain a Higgs boson plus at least two jets. Using fully differential perturbative matrix elements for the weak boson fusion signal process and for the QCD background processes, we generate events in which a Higgs boson is produced along with two jets that carry large transverse momentum. The effectiveness of different prescriptions to enhance the signal to background ratio is studied, and the expected signal purities are calculated in each case. We find that a simple cut on the rapidity of one final-state jet works well. We determine that an accuracy of delta_g/g ~ 10% on the effective coupling g may be possible after ~ 200 fb^-1 of integrated luminosity is accumulated at the LHC.Comment: 34 pages. Some restructuring of the text, a few sentences and one figure added. Conclusions not altered. To be published in Physical Review

A Voting-Based System for Ethical Decision Making

We present a general approach to automating ethical decisions, drawing on machine learning and computational social choice. In a nutshell, we propose to learn a model of societal preferences, and, when faced with a specific ethical dilemma at runtime, efficiently aggregate those preferences to identify a desirable choice. We provide a concrete algorithm that instantiates our approach; some of its crucial steps are informed by a new theory of swap-dominance efficient voting rules. Finally, we implement and evaluate a system for ethical decision making in the autonomous vehicle domain, using preference data collected from 1.3 million people through the Moral Machine website.Comment: 25 pages; paper has been reorganized, related work and discussion sections have been expande

Distributional Survey of the Fishes of Ten Mile Creek in Southeastern Arkansas

A survey of the fishes of Ten Mile Creek was conducted during 1976 to 1979. The ichthyofauna of Ten Mile Creek is typical of lowland drainage systems in southeastern Arkansas. Fifty-three species representing 13 families and 23 genera were collected. Etheostoma parvipinne was locally abundant in the headwaters, and other vulnerable or rare species included Notropls maculatus, Fundulus notti, Fundulus chrysotus, Erimyzon sucetta, Moxostoma poecilurum, and Lepomis punctatus. Eight specimens of Notropis hubbsi were collected

Establishing Pose Based Features Using Histograms for the Detection of Abnormal Infant Movements

The pursuit of early diagnosis of cerebral palsy has been an active research area with some very promising results using tools such as the General Movements Assessment (GMA). In this paper, we conducted a pilot study on extracting important information from video sequences to classify the body movement into two categories, normal and abnormal, and compared the results provided by an independent expert reviewer based on GMA. We present two new pose-based features, Histograms of Joint Orientation 2D (HOJO2D) and Histograms of Joint Displacement 2D (HOJD2D), for the pose-based analysis and classification of infant body movement from video footage. We extract the 2D skeletal joint locations from 2D RGB images using Cao et al.’s method 1. Using the MINI-RGBD dataset 2, we further segment the body into local regions to extract part specific features. As a result, the pose and the degree of displacement are represented by histograms of normalised data. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed features, we trained several classifiers using combinations of HOJO2D and HOJD2D features and conducted a series of experiments to classify the body movement into categories. The classification algorithms used included k-Nearest Neighbour (kNN, k=1 and k=3), Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) and the Ensemble classifier. Encouraging results were attained, with high accuracy (91.67{\%}) obtained using the Ensemble classifier

Luminescence complementation technology for the identification of MYC:TRRAP inhibitors

Mechanism-based targeted therapies have exhibited remarkable success in treating otherwise untreatable or unresectable cancers. Novel targeted therapies that correct dysregulated transcriptional programs in cancer are an unmet medical need. The transcription factor MYC is the most frequently amplified gene in human cancer and is overexpressed because of mutations in an array of oncogenic signaling pathways. The fact that many cancer cells cannot survive without MYC - a phenomenon termed MYC addiction - provides a compelling case for the development of MYC-specific targeted therapies. We propose a new strategy to inhibit MYC function by disrupting its essential interaction with TRRAP using small molecules. To achieve our goal, we developed a platform using luminescence complementation for identifying small molecules as inhibitors of the MYC:TRRAP interaction. Here we present validation of this assay by measuring the disruption of TRRAP binding caused by substitutions to the invariant and essential MYC homology 2 region of MYC

Mixing at Young Ages Reduces Fighting in Unacquainted Domestic Pigs

Under normal farming practices, piglets from different litters are often mixed around the time of weaning, and a high incidence of fighting and minor injuries often occur. The aim of this experiment was to determine the effect of age on the incidence of fighting in piglets mixed before weaning, at different ages between 5 and 26 days. We found no significant relationship between age and the likelihood that a pair of piglets would fight during the first 75 min after mixing. However, the duration of the first fight observed increased from 101±38 s at 5 days to 621±278 s at 26 days, mainly because of higher levels of unretaliated harassment and resting during the bouts. Younger pigs also showed 80% fewer injuries from the fighting. The results suggest some potential welfare advantage to allowing litters to mix at younger ages

newYAWL : achieving comprehensive patterns support in workflow for the control-flow, data and resource perspectives

The Workflow Patterns provide a conceptual foundation for the control-flow, data and resource perspectives of process-aware information systems (PAIS). In this paper we present newYAWL, a reference language for PAIS based on the workflow patterns. newYAWL radically extends previous work undertaken on the YAWL language and provides a comprehensive formal description of how the complete set of workflow patterns can be realized and integrated in the context of an operational PAIS

Towards Run-time Assurance of Advanced Propulsion Algorithms

This paper covers the motivation and rationale for investigating the application of run-time assurance methods as a potential means of providing safety assurance for advanced propulsion control systems. Certification is becoming increasingly infeasible for such systems using current verification practices. Run-time assurance systems hold the promise of certifying these advanced systems by continuously monitoring the state of the feedback system during operation and reverting to a simpler, certified system if anomalous behavior is detected. The discussion will also cover initial efforts underway to apply a run-time assurance framework to NASA's model-based engine control approach. Preliminary experimental results are presented and discussed

Superconducting fluctuations in the Luther-Emery liquid

The single-particle superconducting Green's functions of a Luther-Emery liquid is computed by bosonization techniques. Using a formulation introduced by Poilblanc and Scalapino [Phys. Rev. B v. 66, art. 052513 (2002)], an asymptotic expression of the superconducting gap is deduced in the long wavelength and small frequency limit. Due to superconducting phase fluctuations, the gap exhibits as a function of size L a (1/L)^{1/2K_\rho} power-law decay as well as an interesting singularity at the spectral gap energy. Similarities and differences with the 2-leg t-J ladder are outlined.Comment: RevTeX 4, 3 pages, 2 EPS figure