This thesis is a comparative study of the two processes of currency change that occurred in Ecuador in 2000 and in France in 2002. Although the background of these two countries and the motivations behind each currency change varied, Ecuador and France have experienced many similar outcomes. Each of the...
This analysis of Colombia's System of National Park Reservations
accomplishes four objectives: 1) The historical development of national
parks in Colombia was described; 2) The status, as of August,
1974, of the areas administered by the Colombian Renewable Natural
Resources Development Institute (INDERENA) was summarized; 3) An
analysis of major...
Building institutional and human capacity for integrated coastal zone management (ICZM) is
increasingly recognized as critical to the future of sustainable development in coastal states.
Agenda 21 of the UNCED conference has underscored the urgency of capacity building for
ICZM as have other international bodies such as the North American...
In this thesis, we introduce a novel Explanation Neural Network (XNN) to explain the predictions made by a deep network. The XNN works by embedding a high-dimensional activation vector of a deep network layer non-linearly into a low-dimensional explanation space while retaining faithfulness i.e., the original deep learning predictions can...
This thesis seeks to determine whether a self-driving car's behavior should depend on the hearing status of its passengers: namely, hard-of-hearing (including deaf) or hearing. It is believed that auditory deprivation provokes adaptations in visual attention. These adaptations may lead to atypical movement patterns that can translate to different driving...
In the last twenty years, human trafficking has gained attention in government agendas and media coverage, while anti-trafficking projects have burgeoned worldwide. Anti-trafficking efforts, however, have almost exclusively addressed the issue of sex trafficking with a focus on rescuing women, while overlooking other types of exploitation. This is noteworthy, given...
We consider multiple Compressive Sensing (CS) problems wherein the supports of signal vectors of CS problems are restricted to satisfy a collection of joint logical constraints, which we refer to as coupling constraints. We consider a case where the coupling constraints are encoded in a graph and present a sequential...
The relationship between a country's degree of openness and its economic well-being has been examined extensively both theoretically and empirically. Numerous empirical studies using different openness measures have found a positive effect of openness on growth. However, the validity of such measures have
come into question due to data issues....
Biodiversity continues to decline in the face of increasing anthropogenic pressures such as habitat destruction, exploitation, pollution and introduction of alien species. Existing global databases of species’ threat status or population time series are dominated by charismatic species. The collation of datasets with broad taxonomic and biogeographic extents, and that...
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Farwig82, Tom M. Fayle4,83,84, Antonio Felicioli85, Annika M.
Felton86, Gentile F. Ficetola87, Bruno K. C
Newcomers’ seamless onboarding is important for open collaboration communi- ties, particularly those that leverage outsiders’ contributions to remain sustainable. Nevertheless, previous work shows that OSS newcomers often face several barriers to contribute, which lead them to lose motivation and even give up on contributing. A well-known way to help newcomers...
Biological invasions create complex ecological
and societal issues worldwide. Most of the
knowledge about invasions comes only from successful
invaders, but less is known about which processes
determine the differential success of invasions. In this
review, we develop a framework to identify the main
dimensions driving the success and failure...
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hypotheses
Ivan Arismendi • Brooke E. Penaluna • Jason B. Dunham • Carlos Garcı́a de Leaniz •
Doris Soto
The United States is struggling to improve the educational attainment of high school students in order to meet workforce needs and remain internationally competitive. Fewer than 80% of U.S. students graduate from high school despite 30 years of policy initiatives aimed at improving graduation rates. This study focuses on completion...
Most studies dealing with the use of ecological indicators and other applied ecological research rely on some definition or concept of what constitutes least-, intermediate- and most-disturbed condition. Currently, most rigorous methodologies designed to define those conditions are suited to large spatial extents (nations, ecoregions) and many sites (hundreds to...
This thesis addresses a basic problem in computer vision, that of semantic labeling of images. Our work is aimed at object detection in biological images for evolutionary biology research. In particular, our goal is to detect nematocysts in Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) images. This biological domain presents challenges for existing...
The purpose of this study is to examine the role of a Filipino American college student organization at a Predominantly White Institution, and uncover elements of the organization that influence or limit the development of critical consciousness of its members. This study focuses on the aspect of critical consciousness that...
This work – in which three peer-reviewed academic papers are presented – addresses the ap-plication of Bayesian Reinforcement Learning to the control of a class of ocean wave energy conversion systems. The first paper presents a comparison of a Reinforcement-Learning (RL) based wave energy converter controller against standard Reactive Damping...