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Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) are a viable product for many different markets. One specific area of promise is the use of CNTs in supercapacitors. The CNT synthesis is a two-step process with the first being the formation of a thin film layer. The thin film substrate is created by means of the Thermal Evaporation Physical Vapor Deposition (TPVD) process. After the thin film substrate is deposited, the CNTs are grown in a Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD) growth chamber. Analysis of the thin film substrate and CNTs is performed primarily using Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM). The results show the inclusion of ultrapure water in the CVD process contributed to the success of CNT growth. Multiple prong CNT grow is seen for CVDs trails of silver thin film layer deposited on silicon substrates. The silver nanoparticle had a large diameter with an acute contact angle. The single prong growth indicates the iron nanoparticles formed an obtuse contact angle due to the amorphic surface of alumina substrate. The focus of this project is to explore and investigate different materials and conditions for optimal CNT synthesis in the hopes of creating a uniform forest of vertically aligned carbon nanotubes. © 2019 World Scientific Publishing Company.

Intrinsic fluorescence spectra of fresh normal and cancerous human breast tissues were measured using two selective excitation wavelengths including 290nm and 340nm. Dual-wavelength excitation may reveal more molecular information than single-wavelength excitation. In the meantime, it is significantly faster than the acquisition of excitation-emission (EEM) matrix. Unsupervised machine learning algorithms principal component analysis (PCA) and non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) were used to reduce the dimensionality of the spectral data. The relative concentrations of the basis spectra retrieved by PCA and NMF were considered features of the samples and used to distinguish normal and malignant tissues. The performances of classification using support vector machine (SVM) based on PCA and NMF features were compared. The classification using spectral data with dual-wavelength excitation was compared with single-wavelength excitation. Classification based on NMF-retrieved components from spectral data with dual-wavelength excitation yielded the best performance. © 2019 SPIE.

We report a new measurement of D0-meson production at mid-rapidity (|y|<1) in Au + Au collisions at sNN=200GeV utilizing the heavy flavor tracker, a high resolution silicon detector at the STAR experiment. Invariant yields of D0 mesons with transverse momentum pT9GeV/c are reported in various centrality bins (0-10%, 10-20%, 20-40%, 40-60%, and 60-80%). Blast-wave thermal models are used to fit the D0-meson pT spectra to study D0 hadron kinetic freeze-out properties. The average radial flow velocity extracted from the fit is considerably smaller than that of light hadrons (π,K, and p), but comparable to that of hadrons containing multiple strange quarks (φ,Ξ-), indicating that D0 mesons kinetically decouple from the system earlier than light hadrons. The calculated D0 nuclear modification factors reaffirm that charm quarks suffer a large amount of energy loss in the medium, similar to those of light quarks for pT>4GeV/c in central 0-10% Au + Au collisions. At low pT, the nuclear modification factors show a characteristic structure qualitatively consistent with the expectation from model predictions that charm quarks gain sizable collective motion during the medium evolution. The improved measurements are expected to offer new constraints to model calculations and help gain further insights into the hot and dense medium created in these collisions. © 2019 American Physical Society.

We report the first measurement of the inclusive jet and the dijet longitudinal double-spin asymmetries, ALL, at midrapidity in polarized pp collisions at a center-of-mass energy s=510 GeV. The inclusive jet ALL measurement is sensitive to the gluon helicity distribution down to a gluon momentum fraction of x≈0.015, while the dijet measurements, separated into four jet-pair topologies, provide constraints on the x dependence of the gluon polarization. Both results are consistent with previous measurements made at s=200 GeV in the overlapping kinematic region, x>0.05, and show good agreement with predictions from recent next-to-leading order global analyses. © 2019 authors. Published by the American Physical Society.

J/ψ suppression has long been considered a sensitive signature of the formation of the Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP) in relativistic heavy-ion collisions. In this letter, we present the first measurement of inclusive J/ψ production at mid-rapidity through the dimuon decay channel in Au+Au collisions at sNN=200 GeV with the STAR experiment. These measurements became possible after the installation of the Muon Telescope Detector was completed in 2014. The J/ψ yields are measured in a wide transverse momentum (pT) range of 0.15 GeV/c to 12 GeV/c from central to peripheral collisions. They extend the kinematic reach of previous measurements at RHIC with improved precision. In the 0-10% most central collisions, the J/ψ yield is suppressed by a factor of approximately 3 for pT&gt;5 GeV/c relative to that in p+p collisions scaled by the number of binary nucleon-nucleon collisions. The J/ψ nuclear modification factor displays little dependence on pT in all centrality bins. Model calculations can qualitatively describe the data, providing further evidence for the color-screening effect experienced by J/ψ mesons in the QGP. © 2019 The Author(s)

We report new STAR measurements of the single-spin asymmetries AL for W+ and W- bosons produced in polarized proton-proton collisions at s=510 GeV as a function of the decay-positron and decay-electron pseudorapidity. The data were obtained in 2013 and correspond to an integrated luminosity of 250 pb-1. The results are combined with previous results obtained with 86 pb-1. A comparison with theoretical expectations based on polarized lepton-nucleon deep-inelastic scattering and prior polarized proton-proton data suggests a difference between the ū and d quark helicity distributions for 0.05<x<0.25. In addition, we report new results for the double-spin asymmetries ALL for W±, as well as AL for Z/γ∗ production and subsequent decay into electron-positron pairs. © 2019 authors. Published by the American Physical Society.

We present measurements of the differential cross sections of inclusive J/ψ meson production as a function of transverse momentum (pTJ/ψ) using the μ+μ- and e+e- decay channels in proton+proton collisions at center-of-mass energies of 510 and 500 GeV, respectively, recorded by the STAR detector at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. The measurement from the μ+μ- channel is for 0<pTJ/ψ<9 GeV/c and rapidity range |yJ/ψ|<0.4, and that from the e+e- channel is for 4<pTJ/ψ<20 GeV/c and |yJ/ψ|<1.0. The ψ(2S) to J/ψ ratio is also measured for 4<pTmeson<12 GeV/c through the e+e- decay channel. Model calculations, which incorporate different approaches toward the J/ψ production mechanism, are compared with experimental results and show reasonable agreement within uncertainties. © 2019 authors. Published by the American Physical Society.

Invasive crustacean species have been present in the Long Island Sound, northwestern Atlantic Ocean, for over two centuries. Three new records of introduction are recorded here from collections by local fishermen. Two records are for male Dungeness crabs, Metacarcinus magister (Dana, 1852), collected in the Western Long Island Sound (2017) and Cape Cod Bay (2018). The other record is that of a range extension documented by a single male Chinese mitten crab, Eriocheir sinensis (Milne-Edwards, 1853), found in New Haven Harbor, Connecticut. Both species could potentially harbor nonnative epibionts and endoparasites. Additionally, E. sinensis may be more likely to establish, as it has in numerous locations in the region and worldwide. © Hudson et al.

As the targets of numerous campaigns, intellectuals have sustained mental torment and physical suffering on a large scale. Like the deprivation of human rights for biological and genetic reasons in other lands or other ages, Chinese intellectuals were destined to suffer abridgement of their human rights in the People’s Republic of China for political and ideological reasons. The term “intellectuals” refers to all those who have had a middle school/higher education and those with similar educational levels. Included in the ranks of intellectuals were members of the so-called democratic parties. These people, never large in number, were mostly well educated and well known in intellectual circles. The Cultural Revolution will be long remembered by intellectuals not only as a period of continued mental torment from the earlier days, but more particularly as a period of the most cruel physical abuses in human history. Intellectuals, deprived of their most precious human rights, continue to exist in mainland China as an underclass. © 1988 by Taylor & Francis. All rights reserved.

In 1966, Mao Zedong launched the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in a last attempt to remake China in his image. He believed that the country was led by a party infested from the top on down with “capitalist-roaders” who had betrayed the proletarian goals of true socialism by following the bourgeois line. Denied support in the power structure, Mao sought help from the outside, mobilizing millions of high school and college students as the “Red Guards” to strike down his enemy in an unprecedented campaign that left the nation nearly paralyzed. Red Guard organizations of confusing ideological persuasions soon proliferated throughout the country, and the whole movement quickly got out of control and degenerated into total chaos. That the Red Guards were used by Mao as a tool in the ideologically based power struggle within the party is not only the consensus of most observers but also has been freely admitted by many former Red Guards. © 1988 by Taylor & Francis. All rights reserved.

Many former Red Guards who through the Cultural Revolution were encouraged to participate in unrestrained violence, saw the seamy side of the regime as a result and were themselves eventually suppressed and reached the conclusion that the system was corrupt and had to be changed. Former Red Guards who turned political activists varied greatly in their often vaguely defined outlooks and their intensity of commitment and activity. Wei Jingsheng, China’s most celebrated Red Guard-turned dissident, related a similar experience in an unfinished autobiographical account written before his arrest and smuggled out of the country in 1980. Many former Red Guards understandably see a silver lining in the destructive rampage they committed during the height of the Cultural Revolution. The Red Guard movement has come full circle. The human rights tragedy of the movement is threefold. In the first stage, the Red Guards were Mao’s “little generals” trampling on the human rights of their victims. © 1988 by Taylor & Francis. All rights reserved.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Belarus has been the slowest of the countries in Eastern Europe to shake off its authoritarian past and ties with Russia. However, the Maidan revolution in Ukraine and Russia's subsequent annexation of Crimea and occupation of parts of Eastern Ukraine in 2014 might have forced Belarus's president, Aleksander Lukashenka, to start questioning the terms of this relationship. Russia's violation of Ukraine's sovereignty created a much more real possibility-and fear-that, if push came to shove, Russia would not hesitate to act similarly toward Belarus. Belarus's political choices are hard to predict: will it remain a dictatorship in Russia's shadow or will it embrace democracy and the rule of law and seek closer integration with the West? This study examines Belarus's global policy alignment from 2007 to 2017 by analyzing its voting patterns on contested issues-those on which Russia's and the U.S.'s votes diverged-at the United Nations General Assembly. While Belarus seems to have been disassociating itself from Russia on some global issues, as evidenced by its voting record at the UN General Assembly, and its democracy level increased from 2014-2016, there is insufficient evidence to believe that Belarus might in fact be aligning more with the West and moving away from Russia. While Belarus's diplomatic pendulum has increasingly swung toward the US, it has inevitably bounced back to its "home base"-Russia. © 2019 Heldref Publications. All rights reserved.

In this paper, we present a Neighborhood Search Genetic Algorithms (NSGAs) for mobile robot path planning. GAs have been used successfully in a variety of path planning problem because they can search the space of all possible paths and provide the optimal one. The convergence process of GAs might be lengthy compared to traditional search techniques that depend on local search methods. We propose a hybrid approach that allows GAs to combine both the advantages of GAs and local search algorithms. GAs will create a multiple waypoint path allowing a mobile robot to navigate through static obstacles and finding the optimal path in order to approach the target location without collision. The proposed NSGAs has been examined over four different path planning case studies with varying complexity. The performance of the enhanced GA has been compared with A-star algorithm (A∗) standard GA, particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm. The obtained results show that the proposed approach is able to get good results compared to other algorithms. © 2019 ACM.

For decades, participant carelessness has been considered a problem in collecting data using surveys. Although participant carelessness cannot be disputed to exist, the impact it has on data quality or the level of influence or bias it produces in results is questionable. The main purpose of this paper is to determine whether participant carelessness is a substantial problem that significantly influences or biases the results of statistical analyses. This is accomplished by analyzing established management relationships through a comparison of the full, careful, and careless samples to determine the impact participant carelessness has on data results regarding correlations, t-tests, and simple linear regressions. Four detection approaches were used to identify careless participants individually, in pairs, and in three method combinations. The second purpose of this paper is to use the resampled individual reliability (RIR) approach to detect careless participants and compare it to the individual reliability approach to determine whether the two approaches are fundamentally similar. Data were collected using Mechanical Turk (N = 678). Based on the findings, participant carelessness does not appear to be a substantial problem or demonstrate levels of bias in the results in this study. There are two significant differences between the full and careful samples with the t-tests and the regression comparisons of fit statistics demonstrate the careful samples to have a weak improvement over the full sample however, none indicate bias. The findings also suggest that the individual reliability and the RIR approaches are not entirely fundamentally similar. © ACPIL.

An interpretive qualitative approach insists on the plural and negotiated nature of the meanings that humans attach to their social realities. Thus, the qualitative researcher must navigate multiple and sometimes conflicting commitments to method, data, oneself, participants, and one’s reader. This can lead us to obscure the messiness of data analysis in final research reports and to downplay how methodological choices can make our participants ‘say things.’ In this article, we compare two interpretive methods, thematic and narrative analysis, including their shared epistemological and ontological premises, and offer a pedagogical demonstration of their application to the same data excerpt. However, our broader goal is to use the divergent results to critically examine how our choice of analytic method in interpretive research influences how we (researcher + method) ‘author’ data stories. Ultimately, researcher reflexivity must go beyond acknowledging how one’s position may influence the data analysis or the participant. © 2019, © 2019 Australian and New Zealand Communication Association.

With the growing access to technology in the medical domain, an increased volume of medical data is recorded. The size and complexity of these data make the process of analysis of meaningful discoveries of beneficial patterns more challenging. This problem has attracted numerous researchers around the world. Statistical methods have been employed to handle medical data for diagnosis purposes. Unfortunately, these methods were less capable of dealing with these massive and complex datasets. To solve this problem, we suggest a process to classify medical data which includes feature selection and classification using a number of supervised learning techniques. Binary Brain Storm Optimization (BBSO) is used for feature selection, which is a population search approach that simulates the process of electing the best idea (solution), among others. We simulated six different classifiers: Naive-Bayes, K-Nearest Neighbor, Support Vector Machine, Linear Discriminant Analysis, Decision Tree and Random Forest. Five datasets adopted from the UCI Machine Learning Repository, (Breast Cancer, Diabetes, Heart Disease, Chronic Kidney, and SPECT), are employed as a benchmark test data. The performance of BBSO is evaluated using accuracy on the datasets using the various classifiers. Experimental results show that the proposed approach improves the classification performance for better medical diagnosis. © 2019 ACM.

Keystroke dynamics has been used as a form of one-time user authentication and continuous verification especially when it comes to securing the cyberspace. In this paper, we present the idea of using keystroke dynamics as a form of second layer authentication in web applications. We showed that this method can authenticate a user with high accuracy and can be used as an alternate to CAPTCHA tests, security questions and image selections that are being used today. We have developed a working web-based platform in a browser environment that enforces the proposed second-layer security. We performed penetration test experiments by launching a total of 598,500 impostor and genuine authentication attempts and found the Equal Error Rate (EER) as 10.5%. © 2019 IEEE.