Critique [of The Ethnic Matrix: Implications for Human Service Practitioners by Jesse M. Vazquez]

Vazquez brings to the fore a number of elements which should be of concern to educators as well as counselors today. His article is primarily concerned with the intertwining of cultures in the United States as ethnic minority groups increase in numbers

[Review of] Alfredo Mirande\u27. The Chicano Experience: An Alternative Perspective

Developed as a way to clarify and distinguish between Mexican-Americans and Chicanos, The Chicano Experience is a narrative of the history and struggles of the Chicanos living in the United States

Man-pack antenna at X-band

In this paper a low cost man-pack antenna for satellite communications at X band is presented. The antenna has dual circular polarization in Tx and Rx

Sudden changes in volatility: The case of five central European stock markets

This is the post-print version of the final paper published in Journal of International Financial Markets, Institutions and Money. The published article is available from the link below. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. Copyright @ 2007 Elsevier B.V.This paper investigates sudden changes in volatility in the stock markets of new European Union (EU) members by utilizing the iterated cumulative sums of squares (ICSS) algorithm. Using weekly data over the sample period 1994–2006, the time period of sudden change in variance of returns and the length of this variance shift are detected. A sudden change in volatility seems to arise from the evolution of emerging stock markets, exchange rate policy changes and financial crises. Evidence also reveals that when sudden shifts are taken into account in the GARCH models, the persistence of volatility is reduced significantly in every series. It suggests that many previous studies may have overestimated the degree of volatility persistence existing in financial time series

A method for system of systems definition and modeling using patterns of collective behavior

The Department of Defense ship and aircraft acquisition process, with its capability-based assessments and fleet synthesis studies, relies heavily on the assumption that a functional decomposition of higher-level system of systems (SoS) capabilities into lower-level system and subsystem behaviors is both possible and practical. However, SoS typically exhibit “non-decomposable” behaviors (also known as emergent behaviors) for which no widely-accepted representation exists. The presence of unforeseen emergent behaviors, particularly undesirable ones, can make systems vulnerable to attacks, hacks, or other exploitation, or can cause delays in acquisition program schedules and cost overruns in order to mitigate them. The International Council on Systems Engineering has identified the development of methods for predicting and managing emergent behaviors as one of the top research priorities for the Systems Engineering profession. Therefore, this thesis develops a method for rendering quantifiable SoS emergent properties and behaviors traceable to patterns of interaction of their constitutive systems, so that exploitable patterns identified during the early stages of design can be accounted for. This method is designed to fill two gaps in the literature. First, the lack of an approach for mining data to derive a model (i.e. an equation) of the non-decomposable behavior. Second, the lack of an approach for qualitatively and quantitatively associating emergent behaviors with the components that cause the behavior. A definition for emergent behavior is synthesized from the literature, as well as necessary conditions for its identification. An ontology of emergence that enables studying the emergent behaviors exhibited by self-organized systems via numerical simulations is adapted for this thesis in order to develop the mathematical approach needed to satisfy the research objective. Within the confines of two carefully qualified assumptions (that the model is valid, and that the model is efficient), it is argued that simulated emergence is bona-fide emergence, and that simulations can be used for experimentation without sacrificing rigor. This thesis then puts forward three hypotheses: The first hypothesis is that self-organized structures imply the presence of a form of data compression, and this compression can be used to explicitly calculate an upper bound on the number of emergent behaviors that a system can possess. The second hypothesis is that the set of numerical criteria for detecting emergent behavior derived in this research constitutes sufficient conditions for identifying weak and functional emergent behaviors. The third hypothesis states that affecting the emergent properties of these systems will have a bigger impact on the system’s performance than affecting any single component of that system. Using the method developed in this thesis, exploitable properties are identified and component behaviors are modified to attempt the exploit. Changes in performance are evaluated using problem-specific measures of merit. The experiments find that Hypothesis 2 is false (the numerical criteria are not sufficient conditions) by identifying instances where the numerical criteria produce a false-positive. As a result, a set of sufficient conditions for emergent behavior identification remains to be found. Hypothesis 1 was also falsified based on a worst-case scenario where the largest possible number of obtainable emergent behaviors was compared against the upper bound computed from the smallest possible data compression of a self-organized system. Hypothesis 3, on the other hand, was supported, as it was found that new behavior rules based on component-level properties provided less improvement to performance against an adversary than rules based on system-level properties. Overall, the method is shown to be an effective, systematic approach to non-decomposable behavior exploitation, and an improvement over the modern, largely ad hoc approach.Ph.D

The Development of a Hybrid Optimization Algorithm for the Evaluation and Optimization of the Asynchronous Pulse Unit

The effectiveness of an optimization algorithm can be reduced to its ability to navigate an objective function’s topology. Hybrid optimization algorithms combine various optimization algorithms using a single meta-heuristic so that the hybrid algorithm is more robust, computationally efficient, and/or accurate than the individual algorithms it is made of. This thesis proposes a novel meta-heuristic that uses search vectors to select the constituent algorithm that is appropriate for a given objective function. The hybrid is shown to perform competitively against several existing hybrid and non-hybrid optimization algorithms over a set of three hundred test cases. This thesis also proposes a general framework for evaluating the effectiveness of hybrid optimization algorithms. Finally, this thesis presents an improved Method of Characteristics Code with novel boundary conditions, which better characterizes pipelines than previous codes. This code is coupled with the hybrid optimization algorithm in order to optimize the operation of real-world piston pumps

Antena plana Banda Ku en tecnología SIW

This document contains the different parts of a plain antenna which is able to establish a satellite communication. This antenna has been designed in Ku Band. Nowadays this band is specially used by satellite communications and shows numerous advantages, for instance the antennas have small size therefore these antennas are cheaper. The SIW technology is a fundamental part of this project from start to end, because this technology has a lot of applications and leads in this field. Not only have been simulated all the elements of this antenna but also have been built to compare both simulations and measurements

Uso didáctico de dos versiones de Los últimos días de Pompeya

Dentro de la escasez que habitualmente padecemos de medios útiles que complementen la enseñanza de la lengua, la historia y la cultura latinas, se observa también el poco aprovechamiento que se suele hacer de algunos instrumentos cada día más accesibles