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The Quad-camera Wavefront-sensing Six-channel Speckle Interferometer (QWSSI) is a new speckle imaging instrument available on the 4.3-m Lowell Discovery Telescope (LDT). QWSSI is built to efficiently make use of collected photons and available detector area. The instrument images on a single Electron Multiplying CCD (EMCCD) at four wavelengths in the optical (577, 658, 808, and 880nm) with 40nm bandpasses. Longward of 1μm, two imaging wavelengths in the NIR are collected at 1150 and 1570nm on two InGaAs cameras with 50nm bandpasses. All remaining non-imaging visible light is then sent into a wavefront EMCCD. All cameras are operated synchronously via concurrent triggering from a timing module. With the simultaneous wavefront sensing, QWSSI characterizes atmospheric aberrations in the wavefront for each speckle frame. This results in additional data that can be utilized during post-processing, enabling advanced techniques such as Multi-Frame Blind Deconvolution. The design philosophy was optimized for an inexpensive, rapid build; virtually all parts were commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS), and custom parts were fabricated or 3D printed on-site. QWSSI's unique build and capabilities represent a new frontier in civilian high-resolution speckle imaging. © COPYRIGHT SPIE. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.

Biologists and bioinformaticians heavily rely on data portals and repositories accessible through web application. While they mostly agree that the data is valuable, they find the interfaces hard to use and non-intuitive. In this paper we present a user-centered design of a database for classification and annotation for major and minor introns in various species. Our design is based on surveying and interviewing minor intron researchers and comparing the features of existing databases. In addition to its ease of use, the proposed database, Major and Minor Intron Annotation Database (MMIAD) offers high flexibility in querying and downloading subsets of information that interest the user in multiple commonly used file formats. © Proceedings of the 14th IADIS International Conference Interfaces and Human Computer Interaction 2020, IHCI 2020 and Proceedings of the 13th IADIS International Conference Game and Entertainment Technologies 2020, GET 2020 - Part of the 14th Multi Conference on Computer Science and Information Systems, MCCSIS 2020. All rights reserved.

Drawing from analyses of teaching and learning, we posit a theoretical framework of axes, practical to epistemic and explicit to implicit, which frame four quadrants of support needed to know how and why to use the crosscutting concepts in sensemaking. This work has implications for the design of learning environments that use the crosscutting concepts in scientific sensemaking. © ISLS.

This paper examines the impact of higher education on youth unemployment. Following the 2008 financial crisis, youth unemployment returned to the fore as a serious concern among policy makers in Europe. A crucial difference from previous recessions is that this time around supply of higher education opportunities was much higher than in the 1980s, and indeed higher education participation rates grew rapidly in many regions during this period. Drawing on previous work on youth unemployment and the economic impacts of education we identify a variety of channels through which higher education is likely to influence youth unemployment. We examine this issue using a macro-panel of European regions for the period 2002-2012. This decade was characterized by variation in economic activity and higher education rates. Our results suggest that expansion of higher education during this period had a mitigating effect on youth unemployment and not recognizing this external benefit of education risks underestimating the effects of macroeconomic shocks on young people. © 2020, University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

Adult content on the Internet may be accessed by children with only a few keystrokes. While separate child-safe accounts may be established, a better approach could be incorporating automatic age estimation capability into the browser. We envision a safer browsing experience by implementing child-safe browsers combined with Internet content rating similar to the film industry. Before such a browser is created it was necessary to test the age estimation module to see whether acceptable error rates are possible. We created an Android application for collecting biometric touch data, specifically tapping data. We arranged with an elementary school, a middle school, a high school, and a university and collected samples from 262 user sessions (ages 5 to 61). From the tapping data, feature vectors were constructed, which were used to train and test 14 regressors and classifiers. Results for regression show the best mean absolute errors of 3.451 and 3.027 years, respectively, for phones and tablets. Results for classification show the best accuracies of 73.63% and 82.28%, respectively, for phones and tablets. These results demonstrate that age estimation, and hence, a child-safe browser, is feasible, and is a worthwhile objective. © 2020 IEEE.

Traditional keyboards remain the input device of choice for typing-heavy environments. When attached to sensitive data, security is a major concern. To continuously authenticate users in these environments, use of keystroke dynamics can be a preferred choice. An integral part of user enrollment in a keystroke based continuous authentication system is the writing instruction (prompt) given to the users, to use as a basis for their improvised writing. There are many prompts possible, and they directly impact the performance of authentication systems. Hence, prompts should be designed carefully, and with purpose. In this paper, we bridge the gap between cognitive psychology and computer science and attempt to influence the mental state of the users to acquire a better authentication performance. We compare two kinds of writing prompts, creative and factual, for generating reference samples. In addition, we perform two robustness tests: robustness to dissimilar writing style (e.g., creative reference and factual test) and robustness to surface (e.g., hard surface reference and soft surface test). We collect data from thirty participants in four weekly sessions. We experiment with three features: key interval, key press, and key hold latencies. We use Relative (R) measure to generate the match score between the reference and test samples. Results show that creative writing consistently performs better than the factual one. Both writing prompts perform well with dissimilar style in testing, i.e., continuous authentication is found robust to writing style. Also, we find that the surface (hard or soft) used in testing need not match that used for the reference, thus continuous authentication is also surface robust. © 2020 IEEE.

The Southern Connecticut Stellar Interferometer (SCSI) is an intensity interferometer that is designed to use correlated photon arrival times to determine the geometry of stars. Originally a low-cost, two-telescope instrument that used a 1-pixel single-photon avalanche diode (SPAD) detector at the focal plane of each telescope to record photon events, it is now being upgraded to include a third telescope. This will allow for the simultaneous detection of the photon correlation at three baselines, and thus the ability to map out the two-dimensional geometry of the source much more efficiently than with the two-telescope arrangement. Recent papers in the literature suggest that it may be possible to derive phase information in the Fourier domain from such triple correlations for the brightest stars, potentially giving SCSI an imaging capability. Prior to investigating this possibility, steps must be taken to maximize the observing efficiency of the SCSI. We present here our latest efforts in achieving better pointing, tracking, and collimation with our telescopes, and we discuss our first modeling results of the three-telescope situation in order to understand under what conditions the upgraded SCSI could retrieve imaging information. © COPYRIGHT SPIE. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.

Based on a pragmatist inspired conception of the social self, the concept of reparations for the harms of genocide is reexamined. Both Raphael Lemkin, the person who invented the term “genocide,” and Claudia Card, a philosopher who examined the evil of genocide, hold similarly expansive notions of the harms inflicted by genocidal violence. Both argued that biological death is not necessarily central to genocide. For Lemkin cultural destruction of the targeted group is just as essential as the actual killing itself. Genocide is a group crime that aims to destroy the group and all the social aspects of group identity. Card similarly sees the target of genocidal violence as the social vitality of the self. This vitality is sustained by group relations. Reparations thus need to be reconceptualize in terms of the restoration of social life of the victim group and not solely on the basis of economic losses. Examples are given for the reparation of the social vitality of communities that have suffered genocide. © 2020 Central European Pragmatist Forum. All rights reserved.

The cyber-behavioral biometric modalities such as keystroke dynamics, mouse dynamics, and touch screen dynamics have come under attacks of different forms in recent days. To address these attacks and other security issues, we present a novel concept of using smartwatch sensor data to continuously verify users in cyberspace and show its potential to be a new standalone cyber-behavioral biometric modality. For our experiments, smartwatch gyroscope and accelerometer data collected from 49 subjects while typing in desktop computer have been considered. We implemented six pattern matching classifiers to compare each verification attempt against the user profile. Experimental results comprising of 282, 240 classification attempts show significantly high True Positive (TP) rates and extremely low False Positive (FP) rates with the highest achieved TP rate of 87.2% and lowest FP rate of 0.2%. With this level of accuracy and natural resiliency to attacks comes with physical biometric property as such in hand movement, we opine that smartwatch movement dynamics, besides being a new biometric trait, can be a solution to the security loopholes in existing cyber-behavioral biometric modalities for continuous verification. © 2020 IEEE.

Web applications are built to be accessible to everyone. Unfortunately, many web applications are inaccessible to people with special needs or disabilities. In this work, we show a methodology used to make web applications more accessible to a diverse group of people. The process includes two phases: evaluation and improvement. In the first phase, the Web Accessibility Barrier (WAB) score metric together with the Accessibility Failure Rate (AFR) metric are used to evaluate web applications. In the second phase changes suggested by accessibility checker tool are implemented in the software to enhance the metrics values and reach the target level of accessibility. The open-source chat application, Zulip, is used as a case study to show the effectiveness of this approach. © 2021 IEEE.

Healthy workplaces promote inclusionary behaviors. When nurses experience exclusionary behaviors such as bullying and incivility, there may also be hidden issues with acceptance of diversity in the workplace environment. Educating nursing staff on the importance of variations in age, culture, gender, sex, race, ethnicity, and religion in the workplace can help facilitate communication among staff. For example, organizations can use educational forums to discuss how different cultures vary in the addressing of conflict within the workplace; some cultures may prefer to reach consensus rather than be confrontational. Chapter 5 discusses strategies that nurses and organizations can implement, such as Team Strategies and Tools to Enhance Performance and Patient Safety (TeamSTEPPS). TeamSTEPPS is a curriculum that can be used to improve teamwork skills, communication, and build team collaboration. © 2021, IGI Global.

Global hyperon polarization, P¯H, in Au+Au collisions over a large range of collision energy, sNN, was recently measured and successfully reproduced by hydrodynamic and transport models with intense fluid vorticity of the quark-gluon plasma. While naïve extrapolation of data trends suggests a large P¯H as the collision energy is reduced, the behavior of P¯H at small sNN¡7.7 GeV is unknown. Operating the STAR experiment in fixed-target mode, we measured the polarization of Λ hyperons along the direction of global angular momentum in Au+Au collisions at sNN=3 GeV. The observation of substantial polarization of 4.91±0.81(stat.)±0.15(syst.)% in these collisions may require a reexamination of the viscosity of any fluid created in the collision, of the thermalization timescale of rotational modes, and of hadronic mechanisms to produce global polarization. © 2021 American Physical Society.

According to first-principle lattice QCD calculations, the transition from quark-gluon plasma to hadronic matter is a smooth crossover in the region μB≤Tc. In this range the ratio, C6/C2, of net-baryon distributions are predicted to be negative. In this Letter, we report the first measurement of the midrapidity net-proton C6/C2 from 27, 54.4, and 200 GeV Au+Au collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). The dependence on collision centrality and kinematic acceptance in (pT, y) are analyzed. While for 27 and 54.4 GeV collisions the C6/C2 values are close to zero within uncertainties, it is observed that for 200 GeV collisions, the C6/C2 ratio becomes progressively negative from peripheral to central collisions. Transport model calculations without critical dynamics predict mostly positive values except for the most central collisions within uncertainties. These observations seem to favor a smooth crossover in the high-energy nuclear collisions at top RHIC energy. © 2021 American Physical Society.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore an emerging ethical theory for the Digital Age – Flourishing Ethics – which will likely be applicable in many different cultures worldwide, addressing not only human concerns but also activities, decisions and consequences of robots, cyborgs, artificially intelligent agents and other new digital technologies. Design/methodology/approach: In the past, a number of influential ethical theories in Western philosophy have focused upon choice and autonomy, or pleasure and pain or fairness and justice. These are important ethical concepts, but we consider “flourishing” to be a broader “umbrella concept” under which all of the above ideas can be included, plus additional ethical ideas from cultures in other regions of the world (for example, Buddhist, Muslim, Confucianist cultures and others). Before explaining the applied approach, this study discusses relevant ideas of four example thinkers who emphasize flourishing in their ethics writings: Aristotle, Norbert Wiener, James Moor and Simon Rogerson. Findings: Flourishing Ethics is not a single ethical theory. It is “an approach,” a “family” of similar ethical theories which can be successfully applied to humans in many different cultures, as well as to non-human agents arising from new digital technologies. Originality/value: This appears to be the first extended analysis of the emerging flourishing ethics “family” of theories. © 2021, Emerald Publishing Limited.

Our research objective is to compare the effectiveness of standard online learning methods versus the utilization of virtual reality in education in terms of student focus and information retention. Our proposed platform will have identical lesson plans in virtual reality as our online learning methods. Eye gaze tracking and a recall test will be used on both platforms to measure focus on the screen and retention, respectively. The ultimate goal of the project is to use this data to evaluate the effectiveness of VR as a digital learning environment. © 2021 IEEE.

In this article we demonstrate the use and usefulness of new materialism as an analytic lens in applied qualitative inquiry. Intended as a possible entry point to applied inquiry after the ontological turn, we draw on Barad's agential realism to analyze three existing transcripts of focus groups conducted with healthcare workers, traditional birth attendants, and mothers to explore the postnatal care referral behavior of traditional birth attendants in Nigeria. We describe elements of our data analysis process including deep reading, summoning of the inquiry, delaying the inquiry, attuning to glowing data, and writing. We explore how the research phenomenon enacted agential cuts that distinguished participants (healthcare workers, traditional birth attendants, and mothers) and relayed their participation in the focus group. We show how the inclusion of the mothers' babies and the transcripts themselves made available some understandings at the possible exclusion of others. Our Baradian, new materialist analysis shows the inextricability of interview materials (things) and language (discourse) and demonstrates that all applied research is bounded and affected by its material conditions. As a point of entry, we hope our illustration sensitizes applied qualitative researchers to how research decisions, research materials, and research cultures produce what can be known and lived within and beyond the research encounter. © 2021 Nova Southeastern University. All rights reserved.