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The Competitive Struggle to Win Tournaments: The Allies’ Race to Capture Adolf Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest
Get PDFTournament theory posits that there are situations where winning matters a lot and, as a result, agent rewards are not proportional to performance. According to tournament theorists, the large pay differentials that exist between organizational levels are intended to motivate agents to exert greater effort in an attempt to win the prize. Although a large corpus of literature on tournaments has emerged over time, little is known about the social dynamics involved in tournaments. This article addresses this gap through a historical narrative concerning how Allied forces in World War II competed to capture Adolf Hitler’s famed Bavarian reception house, known to the world as the Eagle’s Nest
Investigating the Effect of Urea Pretreatment on Bloodstain Detection
Get PDFThroughout the years, many chemical enhancement methods for bloodstain detection have been developed. One of these chemicals is luminol. Blood detection using luminol and its derivatives, like Bluestar™, have been commonly used at many crime scenes. The pre-treatment of 8M urea on bloodstains was proposed in order to increase the intensity of chemiluminescence of the reaction, and to eliminate false positive reactions that can occur. This study takes a look at bloodstains that are placed on two types of surfaces, at varying dilutions, and analyzed after different amounts of time. These bloodstains were analyzed to see how strong of a reaction is obtained after the addition of both 8M urea and the blood detection reagent Bluestar™ to the bloodstain. The addition of Bluestar™ created a chemiluminescent reaction that can be measured both visually and digitally in terms of its strength. It was determined that bloodstains at higher dilution factors, and bloodstains on non-absorbent surfaces like tile, are more likely to have a stronger and more easily detectable chemiluminescent reaction after the addition of urea. Although some improvements were seen from this study, most of the samples tested did not show any significant trend in increasing the strength of their chemiluminescent reaction. This emphasized the necessity to further explore the feasibility of the method and increase its efficiency through improved methods and testing
Gender, Crime Type and DNA: Factors that may Affect Compensation of the Wrongfully Convicted
No full textThe current study sought to assess the factors that determine compensation amounts for the wrongfully convicted. It utilized a comprehensive set of 250 New York cases from the National Registry of Exonerations. The data included exonerations between 1989 and 2018. Although there are numerous factors that affect compensation, the current study focused on three that had not been looked at before: gender, crime type and DNA. Compensation was determined via the dollar amount awarded to each exoneree from the state. The researcher sought to understand if these variables played a role in determining compensation. It was found that while gender had no significant effect, both crime type and DNA did have a significant effect on compensation. Policy implications pertain to whether these variables should influence compensation awarded to those that have been wrongfully convicted
Head Injury, Bully Victimization, and Depression as Predictors of Juvenile Gang Involvement
No full textGang involved youth are responsible for the majority of violent juvenile crime throughout the United States. A better understanding of the risk factors that draw youth towards gangs would be beneficial to the field. The study seeks to understand the predictors of juvenile gang involvement and self-reported juvenile offending using the Pathways to Desistance, a longitudinal study of adjudicated juvenile offenders. The study operationalizes gang involvement as self-reported gang involvement before the age of 18. This study examines whether head injury, bully victimization, and depression are predictors of gang involvement among adolescents and the impact of self-esteem and race/ethnicity in this relationship. The results reveal a significant positive relationship between bully victimization and gang involvement for minorities. Head injury and depression were not significant predictors of gang involvement and self-esteem did not have significant impact on self-reported offending. The implications of these findings to address youth gang involvement are discussed
Development of a Nomogram to Predict the Maximum Contact Stress Between a Bridge I-Girder and a Support Roller
Get PDFThe incremental launching method (ILM) is one of the methods of bridge construction located in environmentally sensitive areas. During the bridge launching, there are significant contact stress issues at the contact regions between the launching system and the steel bridge girders. The Iowa River Bridge (IRB) is a case study of bridge construction that used the ILM during a steel I-girders installation. Contact stress can cause severe defects during launch, which can occur within the material where the material could be damaged.
Hertz contact theory is applied for calculating contact stress between two solid surfaces, which is initially derived from the contact between cylinder and plane surface. However, Hertz contact theory can calculate only the contact area and stress between two elastic solids with specific modeling in equilibrium. The solutions of the launching girder bridge construction\u27s contact stress are not usually possible with closed-form Hertz contact theory solutions because of the complex geometries, loads, and material properties.
Typically, the issues, including complicated structural systems, need to rely on numerical modeling such as the finite element analysis (FEA) from ANSYS® . The primary objective of this study is to provide an estimate the relationship of the maximum contact stress between an I-girder and a roller using a nomogram. The nomogram is built based on a parametric study with various roller dimensions and vertical loads by numerical modeling. A total of 180 numerical models were used to develop the contract stress nomogram. The maximum contact stress from the nomogram can be useful tool in designing a bridge girder on a support roller
Nondestructive Evaluation (NDE) of Additively Manufactured Metal (AMM) Parts Using Ultrasonic Testing (UT)
Get PDFAdditive manufacturing is a category of emerging manufacturing processes that have applications in creating metal components with high value and complexity. The adoption of these parts is limited by the lack of fully developed nondestructive techniques for identifying internal defects. The use of ultrasonic testing for detecting and measuring internal features in additively manufactured metal parts is investigated. A low-cost ultrasonic immersion testing system was designed, constructed, and validated for the inspection of an additively manufactured titanium specimen with artificial defects as well as other metal artifacts. An ultrasound calibration block was additively manufactured from stainless steel type 316L and directly compared to a conventionally produced AISI 1018 steel block using standard inspection techniques. It was found that additively manufactured stainless steel has noticeable acoustic anisotropy with its speeds of sound varying nominally by 8% and greater attenuation than 1018 steel by a factor of at least 0.2 Np/in. To accompany experimental results, elastic wave simulations in a commercially available finite element package were explored
Adaptive Discounting in Reinforcement Learning
Get PDFIn Markov Decision Process (MDP) models of sequential decision-making, it is common practice to account for temporal discounting by incorporating a constant discount factor. While the effectiveness of fixed-rate discounting in various Reinforcement Learning (RL) settings is well-established, the efficiency of this scheme has been questioned in recent studies. Another notable shortcoming of fixed-rate discounting stems from abstracting away the experiential information of the agent, which is shown to be a significant component of delay discounting in human cognition. To address this issue, this thesis proposes a novel method for adaptive discounting entitled State-wise Adaptive Discounting from Experience (SADE). This method leverages the experiential observations of state values in episodic trajectories to iteratively adjust state-specific discount rates. We report experimental evaluations of SADE in Q-learning agents, which demonstrate significant improvements in sample complexity and convergence rate compared to fixed-rate discounting. Additionally, this thesis proposes a second adaptive discounting method for deep RL entitled Batch-wise Adaptive Discounting from Experience (BADE), and reports the experimental analyses of Deep Q-Network (DQN) agents with BADE discounting in an Atari game environment. Finally, the thesis concludes with remarks on future direction of research
Human Trafficking and the Media
Get PDFThis paper focuses on how the media can affect the publics knowledge about human trafficking. Specific attention is paid to what human trafficking is and what the different types of criteria that need to be met are. Of the criteria that is met, the paper looks at the overlapping of requirements between human trafficking and other offenses. More importantly throughout the paper is analyzations on police officers’ beliefs about knowing what human trafficking is, what still needs to be done, and their stance on the current definition. The research presented demonstrates the need for more positive psychological approaches when talking to a victim of human trafficking as they are already a part of a vulnerable group and the need to implement clearer terminology to establish modernized laws and programs
First Year Students\u27 Experience in a Cyber World Course - An Evaluation
Get PDFAlthough cybersecurity is a major present concern, it is not a required subject in University. In response, we developed Cyber World which introduces students to eight highly important cybersecurity topics (primarily taught by none cybersecurity experts). We embedded it into our critical thinking Common Course (core curriculum) which is a team-taught first-year experience required for all students. Cyber World was first taught in Fall 2018 to a cohort of over 150 students from various majors at the University of New Haven. This article presents the evaluation of our Fall taught course. In detail, we compare the performance of Cyber World students to other Common Course sections that ran in parallel and conclude that despite the higher workload students performed equally well. Furthermore, we assess the students’ development throughout the course with respect to their cybersecurity knowledge where our results indicate a significant gain of knowledge. Note, this article also presents the idea and topics of Cyber World; however a detailed explanation has been released previously
Contributions of Crude Oil Exchange Traded Funds in Price Discovery Process
Get PDFThis study empirically investigates the contributions of three crude oil-based exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in the price discovery process. Using daily data on the crude oil spot, near month crude oil futures, and three crude-oil-based ETFs, we analyze the price discovery contributions of the five-price series. We use two information share measures, namely the generalized information share (GIS) measure (Lien and Shrestha, 2014) and the permanent-temporary decomposition (PT/GG) measure (Gonzalo and Granger, 1995). We find that the futures market dominates the price discovery process. However, we also find that the crude-oil-based ETFs significantly contribute to the price discovery process. Thus, we find that additional ETFs play a significant role in price discovery. Therefore, they are not redundant in terms of their price discovery contributions