295 research outputs found
Nyateism vs teism-debatten : En analys av Dinesh D'Souza's argumentation
No full textDuring the last few years the western world has seen an increasing interest in the topic of atheism, with bestselling books by writers like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens. The critic of religions that these writers have brought to the table have not gone unmet, with writers like Dinesh D'Souza rushing to the defence of Chrisianity. Taking on the arguments of New York Times bestselling author Dinesh D'Souza in the current debate on the existece of God and the usefullness of religion, I here examine the claim by D'Souza that atheism, in fact, is responsible for the worst mass murders of history. In taking D'Souza's arguments and analyzing them on its own philosophical merits, with methods like the process of elimination and information evaluation (i.e source criticism), I will here show just exactly how persuasive these arguments prove to be. In the following pages we will not only discuss the role of atheism in 20th centuary totalitarianism, but also answer questions like ”Was Hitler an atheist or a theist?”, ”Is atheism responsible for the worst crimes of history?” and ”Are people who believe in God in fact more moral the those who do not?
Determinig the efficacy of mathematical programming approaches for multi-group classification:
No full textManagers have been grappling with the problem of extracting patterns out of the vast database generated by their systems. The advent of powerful information systems in organizations and the consequent agglomeration of vast pool of data since the mid-1980s have created renewed interest in the usefulness of discriminant analysis (DA). Expert systems have come to the aid of managers in their day-to-day decision making with many successful applications in financial planning, sales management, and other areas of business operations (Erenguc and Koehler 1990).
Currently, no comprehensive research study exists that tests the robustness of multi-group classification analysis. Our research aims to bridge the gaps in the existing works and take a step further by extending our study to four-group classification problems. The main purpose of this research is to determine the efficacy of mathematical programming classification models, more specifically, LP methods vis-à-vis statistical approaches such as discriminant analysis (Mahalanobis) and logistic regression, an artificial intelligence (AI) technique such as a neural network, and a non-parametric technique such as k-nearest neighborhood (k-NN) for four-group classification problems. This research also proposes an integrated (hybrid) model that combines a non-parametric classification technique and a LP approach to enhance the overall classification performance. Furthermore, the study extends an existing two-group LP model (Bal et al. 2006) based on the work of (Lam and Moy 1996b) and apply it to four-group classification problems. These models are tested through robust computational experiments under varying data conditions using a financial product example. The characteristics of a real dataset are used to simulate (Monte Carlo method) multiple sample runs for four group classification problems with three continuous independent variables.
The experimental results show that LP approaches in general and the proposed integrated method in particular consistently have lower misclassification rates for most data characteristics. Furthermore, the integrated method utilizes the strengths of both the methods: k-NN and linear programming, thereby considerably improving the classification accuracy.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical references (p. 83-97)by Dinesh R. Pa
Magnitude and determinants of the ratio between prevalences of low vision and blindness in rapid assessment of avoidable blindness surveys
No full textPart A of the dissertation includes the protocol of the study, which was approved by Faculty of Health Sciences Human Research Ethics Committee, University of Cape Town. The study was observational analytical, aiming to determine the magnitude and determinants of the ratio between prevalence of low vision and prevalence of blindness using Rapid Assessment of Avoidable Blindness (RAAB) surveys across World Bank regions. The surveys included in the study were available in the RAAB repository and obtained through permission from the primary investigators. A univariate and multivariate analysis were performed using the ratio as an outcome variable and potential explanatory variables as follows: prevalence of Uncorrected Refractive Error (URE), Cataract Surgical Coverage (CSC) at visual acuity 3/60, 6/60 and 6/18 for persons, logarithm of Gross Domestic Product per capita income and health expenditure per capita income. Part B contains the structured literature review. PubMed, Scopus, EBSCOHOST (Africa wide and MEDLINE) and Web of science databases were used to look for literature using the following key words: rapid assessment, blindness, age-related cataract, uncorrected refractive errors, low vision, visual impairment, avoidable OR curable OR preventable OR treatable. The summary of the literature review in addition to the gap in the literature is presented in the section. Part C includes a journal "ready" manuscript. The results showed that the ratio was between 1.35% in Mozambique and 11.03% in India. There was a statistically significant variation of the ratio across the regions: approximately 7.0 in South Asia and approximately 3.0 in Sub-Saharan Africa (X2=28.23, P<0.001). The variables: prevalence of Uncorrected Refractive Errors (URE), Cataract Surgical Coverage at visual acuity 3/60, 6/60 and 6/18 for persons, logarithm of Gross Domestic Product per capita and logarithm of health expenditure per capita were found to be statistically significantly associated with the ratio. However, only prevalence of URE and CSC at 3/60 for persons across the regions were found statistically significant in multivariate analysis
Validation and Use of Quality of life Impact of Refractive Correction Questionnaire in Spectacle Wearers in Malawi: A clinic-based study
Get PDFBackground To assess the psychometric properties of the QIRC questionnaire and use it as an outcome measure in spectacle wearers attending an eye clinic in Malawi. MethodsParticipants who had uncorrected distance visual acuity of below 6/18 and improved to 6/9 or better with spectacles on both eyes were included in the study. The participants self-administered the Chichewa version of the QIRC questionnaire that was translated and culturally adapted for Malawian settings. Psychometric evaluation of the QIRC responses was carried out using the WinSteps software (Version 3.92.1; Winsteps, Chicago, IL) by applying the Andrich rating scale model of the Rasch analysis.Results One hundred and forty-three participants (mean age ± standard deviation, 27.64 ± 2.91; age range; 16 to 39 years; male, 51.7%) completed the QIRC. The Chichewa QIRC had satisfactory psychometric properties (Ordered response categories, Person separation index, 1.93; Item separation index, 3.42; Targeting 0.70) including excellent Rasch-model fit statistics (Infit and Outfit MnSq < 1.30 for all items). The QIRC score was not significantly associated with sex, age, magnitude of refractive error, occupation and status of previous spectacle wear (p> 0.05 for all). The QIRC scores negatively correlated with uncorrected visual acuity (in logMAR) in the better eye (spearman’s rho=-0.34, p < 0.001).ConclusionsThe translated and culturally adapted version of the QIRC Questionnaire had satisfactory psychometric properties to measure the refractive error-specific quality of life in Malawi. It performed well as an outcome measure of spectacle wear.
Key words: validation, quality of life, Rasch analysis, spectacles, Malaw
Conservative Author Dinesh D’Souza Celebrates America’s Greatness in Lawrence University Appearance
Get PDFNoted conservative author Dinesh D’Souza takes on the critics and defends America’s unique standing as the “freest and most decent society in existence” in an address Thursday, May 20 at Lawrence University.
Based on his 2002 book of the same name, D’Souza presents “What’s So Great About America” at 7:30 p.m. in the Lawrence Memorial Chapel.
Written in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks, “What’s So Great About America” celebrates the United States, in D’Souza’s view as, “the best life our world has to offer” while taking on those who hate America, including radical Muslims.
Born and raised in India, D’Souza, 43, immigrated to the United States in 1978. After earning a degree from Dartmouth University, he served as the editor of Prospect magazine and spent a year as managing editor of the conservative magazine Policy Review. In 1987, D’Souza joined the Reagan administration as a senior domestic policy analyst.
In addition to “What’s So Great About America,” D’Souza is the author of six other books, including 1991′s bestseller “Illiberal Education,” in which he casts a critical eye on the state of contemporary American higher education. He has also written a biography of Jerry Falwell, “Falwell: Before the Millennium,” provided a controversial view of the role of race in American society in “The End of Racism” and argues the case why Ronald Reagan should be considered among the nation’s greatest presidents in his 1997 book “Ronald Reagan: How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader.”
Hailed by Investor’s Business Daily as one of the “top young public-policy makers in the country,” D’Souza’s writing also has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Vanity Fair, Forbes, Harper’s and the Atlantic Monthly.
He currently serves as the Robert and Karen Rishwain Research Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, specializing in issues of social and individual responsibility, civil rights and affirmative action, economics and society and higher education.
D’Souza is speaking at the invitation of the Lawrence College Republicans, and his appearance is sponsored by the Class of ’65 Student Activity Fund, the Young America’s Foundation, and the Outagamie County Republican Party
Thematic Analysis of Discussion Board Posts from a Self-Management Program for People With Systemic Sclerosis
No full textAbstract
Date Presented 3/31/2017
This session discusses the themes that emerged from discussion boards that were part of a self-management program for people with systemic sclerosis. Themes revealed more positive than negative strategies, thus supporting the inclusion of social interactions in self-management programs.
Primary Author and Speaker: Janet Poole
Additional Authors and Speakers: Sharon Newbill, Jennifer Serrano, Pedro Cuencas, Dinesh Khanna</jats:p
Magnitude and Determinants of the Ratio between Prevalence of Low Vision and Blindness in Rapid Assessment of Avoidable Blindness Surveys
No full textPurpose: To determine the magnitude and determinants of the ratio between prevalence of low vision and prevalence of blindness in rapid assessment of avoidable blindness (RAAB) surveys globally. Methods: Standard RAAB reports were downloaded from the repository or requested from principal investigators. Potential predictor variables included prevalence of uncorrected refractive error (URE) as well as gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, health expenditure per capita of the country across World Bank regions. Univariate and multivariate linear regression were used to investigate the correlation between potential predictor variables and the ratio. Results: The results of 94 surveys from 43 countries showed that the ratio ranged from 1.35 in Mozambique to 11.03 in India with a median value of 3.90 (Interquartile range 3.06;5.38). Univariate regression analysis showed that prevalence of URE (p = 0.04), logarithm of GDP per capita (p = 0.01) and logarithm of health expenditure per capita (p = 0.03) were significantly associated with the higher ratio. However, only prevalence of URE was found to be significant in multivariate regression analysis (p = 0.03). Conclusion: There is a wide variation in the ratio of the prevalence of low vision to the prevalence of blindness. Eye care service utilization indicators such as the prevalence of URE may explain some of the variation across the regions.</p
Treatment of Anisometropic Amblyopia in Children with Refractive Correction
Get PDFBackground: The main purpose of the study is to determine the effectiveness of spectacles alone in the treatment of anisometropia in paediatric population.Methods: A hospital based prospective study was conducted on twenty children (involving twenty-six eyes) with freshly diagnosed anisometropic amblyopia of mild to moderate grade. Optimal refractive correction was provided with spectacles alone and was followed at every 3 weeks until amblyopia resolved.Results: The mean line of improvement in visual acuity in 3 weeks was 0.85 ± 0.65 snellen lines. The mean line improvement in second follow up was 0.80 ± 0.70 lines. There was statistically significant (p=0.04) decrease in inter-ocular acuity (IOD) for anisometropia of 1 to 2.0D. The IOD improvement was associated with age (1.53 snellen lines in more than 8 years) in first follow up (p=0.001). IOD also decreased in children of more than 8 yrs.Conclusions: As in nearly half of the participants, especially who has minimal interocular acuity difference, anisometropic amblyopia resolved to normal acuity within first three weeks, we can conclude that the early improvement of visual acuity is related to lesser amount of anisometropia, age and sex
Measuring effectiveness and value of email advertisements in relationship-oriented email messages
Get PDFThesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design and Management Program; and, (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division, Technology and Policy Program, 2008.This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.Includes bibliographical references (p. 63-70).This thesis explores the value of email advertisements in relationship-based communication by measuring click-through rates. Advertisements were embedded within standard electronic mail messages in a template. The results are discussed in aggregate to better understand this medium and value in an advertising context, but the analysis also breaks down how six factors affect click behavior by recipients. The factors include the impact of a privacy statement, type of organizational recipients, click timing, recent advertisements, advertisement frequency, and advertisement relevance. The results are also analyzed using a chi-squared statistical test to determine whether the individual factor is significant in this analysis. This paper also discusses the privacy implications of advertising in a social-medium with comparisons to social ads using Facebook's Beacon as a benchmark. A discussion of how these results apply in an email environment where anti-SPAM infrastructure is a large part of the overall system is evaluated as well. Results show that internal recipients are an effective target market for relationship messaging and that emails often generate clicks days or weeks after the original message was delivered. The research is very relevant to email and targeted advertising, but also applies in a broader context to social advertising where there is a existing relationship between a sender and recipient.by Dinesh Shenoy.S.M
RT-DEFORM: Interactive Ray Tracing of Dynamic Scenes using BVHs
Get PDFPart of this work was performed while the primary author was
working at Intel corporation. We would like to thank Ingo Wald,
Alexander Reshetov, Gordon Stoll and UNC's GAMMA group for
helpful discussions and feedback, as well as the anonymous reviewers
for their comments. The model used for the dress simulation
is courtesy of Walt Disney Feature Animation and the
Bunny and Buddha models are courtesy of the 3D scanning repository
at Stanford University. This work was supported in part
by ARO Contracts DAAD19-02-1-0390 and W911NF-04-1-0088,
NSF awards 0400134 and 0118743, ONR Contract N00014-01-1-
0496, DARPA/RDECOM Contract N61339-04-C-0043, Intel, and
LOCAL LLNL LDRD project (05-ERD-018) and was performed
under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy by the University
of California, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory under
Contract No. W-7405-Eng-48
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