Capital punishment--Public opinion; Murder victims' families--Attitudes; Murder victims' families--Psychology
Two common assumptions are that the family members of murder victims will achieve closure and perceive a sense of justice following the execution of their loved one's murderer. These assumptions, however, may be unfounded. Using family member...
Executions and executioners--Press coverage; Mass media and public opinion; Capital punishment in popular culture; Death row inmates--Press coverage
The public's exposure to state sanctioned killings is limited to the mass media representations such as editorials, news reports, feature films, and books. Therefore it is important to examine the process of execution and its relation to the media...
Nazi Saboteurs Trial, Washington, D.C., 1942; Trials (Sabotage)--Washington (D.C.); War and emergency powers--United States; Military courts--United States--History
For over two hundred years a major issue in the history of the United States is the contentious issue of military commissions. Military commissions are not new or specific to the United States, but the United States traces its first military...
Pattern recognition systems; Cluster analysis; Data mining
Despite the large number of existing clustering methods, clustering remains a challenging task especially when the structure of the data does not correspond to easily separable categories, and when clusters vary in size, density and shape. Existing...
A hyper basis function network (HyperBF) is a generalized radial basis function network (RBF) where the activation function is a radial function of a weighted distance. The local weighting of the distance accounts for the variation in local scaling...
Horse farmers make yearly decisions concerning the management of feeding horses. These decisions are affected by the cost to grow hay, the cost to buy hay, the cost associated with selling hay, the expected crop yield under various weather...
In recent years, a number of computational and statistical problems for identifying SNP-SNP interactions in high dimensional survival data have been studied, and several data mining approaches have been proposed. However, the relative performance...
Preventive maintenance is a broad term that encompasses a set of activities aimed at improving the overall reliability and availability of a system. Preventive maintenance involves a basic trade-off between the costs of conducting...
A common research interest in medical, biological, and engineering research is determining whether certain independent variables are correlated with the survival or failure times. Standard statistical techniques cannot usually be applied for...
New firms face financial constraints that could hinder firm performance. Yet founders exhibit persistence and resourcefulness in building their new ventures and finding solutions to their financial constraints. The use of financial theories that...
Two stage stochastic programming is an important part in the whole area of stochastic programming, and is widely spread in multiple disciplines, such as financial management, risk management, and logistics. The two stage stochastic programming is a...
The advent of larger storage spaces, affordable digital capturing devices, and an ever growing online community dedicated to sharing images has created a great need for efficient analysis methods. In fact, analyzing images for the purpose of...
From a computerized image analysis prospective, early diagnosis of lung cancer involves detection of doubtful nodules and classification into different pathologies. The detection stage involves a detection approach, usually by template matching,...
Postal service--History; Postal service--Southwest, Old
In every civilization of which any record has been preserved, there is known to have been some organized plan for maintaining communication by couriers who were either post runners or riders mounted. The relaying of these couriers was an obvious...
Women's United Soccer Association; Women soccer players--History; Soccer for women; Professional sports
The purpose of this study is to examine the creation and demise of the WUSA, and to establish the league as a social movement organization (SMO) within the context of the rich body of social movement literature. In explaining the rise and fall of...
Emergency management--Kentucky; Assistance in emergencies--Kentucky; Disaster relief--Kentucky; Transportation--Planning
Large-scale emergencies caused by earthquake, tornado, pandemic flu, terrorism attacks and so on can wreak havoc to communities. In order to mitigate the impact of the events, emergency stockpiles of food, water, medicine and other materials have...
This dissertation is composed of three essays in which I examine the influence of formal institutions on entrepreneurs and new firms. In the first essay, "The Influence of Institutions on the Likelihood of Self-Employment: A Multilevel...
Coal-fired power plants--Environmental aspects--United States; Mercury wastes--Environmental aspects--United States
This dissertation tests whether or not mercury emissions from electric power plants are not a significant contributor to mercury measurements in rainfall and argues that the current United States (U.S.) Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)...
Research--Moral and ethical aspects; Sociology--Research--Moral and ethical aspects
This dissertation is a comparative theoretical analysis of human rights, research ethics and human subjects protection. The history of human rights is a long one, but for the sake of immediacy and focus, the author will limit the discussion to...
This thesis is an historical, theoretical and empirical examination of women's health concepts and health behavior in contemporary consumer-oriented American society. It begins with an historical overview of social health movements to illustrate...
