Photographs of Iraqi prisoners’ abuse by American soldiers sent shockwaves throughout the world during the Iraq War (Wikipedia, 2003). This again raised the question of human rights and how these rights are balanced in diverse societies. This article intends to focus on the relationship between human rights and religious requirements in the day-to-day functioning of public schools.

Conditional Random Fields (CRFs) is a discriminative and supervised approach for simultaneous sequence segmentation and frame labeling. Latent-Dynamic Conditional Random Fields (LDCRFs) incorporates hidden state variables within CRFs which model sub-structure motion patterns and dynamics between labels. Motivated by the success of LDCRFs in gesture recognition, we propose a framework for automatic facial expression recognition from continuous video sequence by modeling temporal variations within shapes using LDCRFs. We show that the proposed approach outperforms CRFs for recognizing facial expressions. Using Principal Component Analysis (PCA) we study the separability of various expression classes in lower dimension projected spaces. By comparing the performance of CRFs and LDCRFs against that of Support Vector Machines (SVMs) and a template based approach, we demonstrate that temporal variations within shapes are crucial in classifying expressions especially for those with small facial motion like anger and sadness. We also show empirically that only using changes in facial appearance over time without using the shape variations fails to obtain high performance for facial expression recognition. This reflects the importance of geometric deformations on face for recognizing expressions. / text

This dissertation is an ethnographic study of nine different students in three American public high schools, their experimentation with alcohol and drugs, and their respective processes of identity formation. While much work has done to establish the relevant and various paths towards finding identity in the American adolescent and in the fields of American education, public schooling, and youth culture, this work attempts to offer a specific presentation of what the path towards finding identity looks like in the American classroom for students who also experiment with alcohol and drugs. The nine students are presented in this work via three different category types of identity formations: Creativity Through Chemical, Charisma Through Chemical, and Challenge Through Chemical. The presentation of the students is ethnographic in nature given the various strengths and attributes of the ethnographic approach. The classroom is a valuable location for establishing a unique perspective on adolescent self-expression, a place where students’ projections and the perceptions of others are intertwined. What students experience in the classroom as a group and individually is a meaningful element to their evolving identities. This work establishes the significance of these experiences in conjunction with the students’ experimentation with alcohol and drugs. Adolescence, as a period for young people of identifying with group culture and as an individual while differentiating between right and wrong is a significant developmental phase. This work acknowledges the communities in which these students are engaged, their respective high school communities, the relevant details of each classroom, and explicates the details of their processes of identity formation for these nine students within the context of their classroom cultures. / text

published_or_final_version / Medical Sciences / Master / Master of Medical Sciences

published_or_final_version / Medical Sciences / Master / Master of Medical Sciences

published_or_final_version / Dentistry / Master / Master of Orthodontics

published_or_final_version / Medical Sciences / Master / Master of Medical Sciences

published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / Obstetrics and Gynaecology / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / Clinical Psychology / Master / Master of Social Sciences

published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / Clinical Oncology / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy