In this research, we focus on the early prediction of whether topics are likely to generate significant controversy (in the form of social media such as comments, blogs, etc.). Controversy trend detection is important to companies, governments, national security agencies, and marketing groups because it can be used to identify which issues the public is having problems with and develop strategies to remedy them. For example, companies can monitor their press release to find out how the public is reacting and to decide if any additional public relations action is required, social media moderators can moderate discussions if the discussions start becoming abusive and getting out of control, and governmental agencies can monitor their public policies and make adjustments to the policies to address any public concerns. An algorithm was developed to predict controversy trends by taking into account sentiment expressed in comments, burstiness of comments, and controversy score. To train and test the algorithm, an annotated corpus was developed consisting of 728 news articles and over 500,000 comments on these articles made by viewers from CNN.com. This study achieved an average F-score of 71.3% across all time spans in detection of controversial versus non-controversial topics. The results suggest that it is possible for early prediction of controversy trends leveraging social media.

Increasing demand on aviation industry calls for more pilots. Thus, pilot training systems and pilot-candidate screening systems are essential for civil and military flying training institutes. Before actual flight training, it is not easy to determine whether a flight trainee will be successful in the training. Due to the high cost of actual flight training, it would be better if there were low cost methods for screening and training candidates prior to the actual flight training. This study intended to determine if subject related factors and flight control stick position have an impact on acquisition of simulated flying skills using a PC-based flight simulator. The experimental model was a factorial design with repeated measures. Sixty-four subjects participated in the experiment and were divided into 8 groups. Experiment consisted of 8 sessions in which performance data, such as heading, altitude and airspeed were collected every 15 seconds. Collected data were analyzed using SAS statistical program. Result of multivariate analysis of variance indicated that the three independent variables: nationality, computer game experience, and flight stick position have significant impact on acquiring simulated flying skill. For nationality, Americans recorded higher scores in general (mean: 81.7) than Koreans (mean: 78.9). The difference in mean scores between Americans and Koreans was 2.8 percent. Regarding computer game experience, the difference between high experience group (82.3) and low experience group (78.3) is significant. For high experience group, American side-stick group recorded the highest (mean: 85.6), and Korean side-stick group (mean: 77.2) scored the lowest. For the low experience group, American center-stick group scored the highest (80.6), and the Korean side-stick group (74.2) scored the lowest points. Therefore, there is a significant difference between high experience group and low experience group. The results also reveal that the center-stick position is easier to learn than side-stick position. The difference in performance score between group of center-stick (mean: 82.1) and side-stick (mean: 76.8) is considerable.

Adolf Hitler and Saddam Hussein were the only national leaders ever to use large-scale missile launches against American forces and their wartime allies. In both cases, the missiles were too few in number and lacked the accuracy and warhead size to be militarily effective. Use of the V-2 and SCUD missiles showed that conventionally armed ballistic missiles have minimal tactical military value and are more suitable as terrorist weapons. Indeed, the goal of those two meglomaniacal dictators was to terrorize enemy civilians and achieve a political settlement of a hopeless military situation. Each leader hoped to split the Allied coalitions arrayed against him. Hitler turned his missile against London in 1944 hoping to crush British morale and compel public opinion to demand that Prime Minister Winston Churchill seek an end to the conflict short of total victory. Hussein launched his SCUDs to exploit Arab animosity toward Israel, calculating that terror attacks would trigger Israeli military intervention, provoking a defection of Arab coalition members and forcing the United States and its European allies into a political settlement that would avert military disaster for Iraq. The Allied forces in both cases learned lessons about the limitations of air power as a means of neutralizing a mobile target. Despite massive aerial bombing in both wars, the Allies stopped the mobile launchers only when ground troops overran the launching areas. In the Gulf War, satellites, air supremacy, and Patriot interceptor missiles failed to eliminate the SCUD threat, a task completed by the ground offensive, but such technological advances may prevent future terroristic uses of ballistic missiles. The employment of ballistic missiles has new strategic implications because of the events of September 11, 2001. The global war on terrorism involves the newly defined axis of evil, composed of states capable of producing ballistic missiles. Missile technology transfers to third world countries threaten world stability, in view especially of the possible use of nuclear, chemical or biological warheads. If rogue states judge previous missile attacks to be successful, such success could motivate other leaders or terrorists to use their missiles as instruments of terror.

This dissertation presents a novel method of autonomic face recognition based on the recently proposed biologically plausible network of networks (NoN) model of information processing. The NoN model is based on locally parallel and globally coordinated transformations. In the NoN architecture, the neurons or computational units form distributed networks, which themselves link to form larger networks. In the general case, an n-level hierarchy of nested distributed networks is constructed. This models the structures in the cerebral cortex described by Mountcastle and the architecture based on that proposed for information processing by Sutton. In the implementation proposed in the dissertation, the image is processed by a nested family of locally operating networks along with a hierarchically superior network that classifies the information from each of the local networks. The implementation of this approach helps obtain sensitivity to the contrast sensitivity function (CSF) in the middle of the spectrum, as is true for the human vision system. The input images are divided into blocks to define the local regions of processing. The two-dimensional Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT), a spatial frequency transform, is used to transform the data into the frequency domain. Thereafter, statistical operators that calculate various functions of spatial frequency in the block are used to produce a block-level DCT coefficient. The image is now transformed into a variable length vector that is trained with respect to the data set. The classification was done by the use of a backpropagation neural network. The proposed method yields excellent results on a benchmark database. The results of the experiments yielded a maximum of 98.5% recognition accuracy and an average of 97.4% recognition accuracy. An advanced version of the method where the local processing is done on offset blocks has also been developed. This has validated the NoN approach and further research using local processing as well as more advanced global operators is likely to yield even better results.

In late October 1950, the People's Republic of China (PRC) committed approximately 260,000 troops to combat in North Korea. The initial Chinese decision to intervene in the Korean conflict was based on a misperception of American commitment to halt communist expansion. American actions seemed to communicate the desire to avoid confrontation. The withdrawal of U.S. troops and the limited equipping and training of the South Korean army implied Washington's lack of interest in the fate of Korea. Therefore, Mao endorsed North Korea's proposal for the military reunification of Korea. China stood to gain international prestige and access to Soviet equipment and training at little cost. But the North Korean attack collapsed following the commitment of American and United Nations forces. Chinese troops attacked and surprised the UN forces, inflicting heavy losses while driving them down the peninsula in disarray. Mao desired the quick expulsion of UN forces from Korea. To this end, the Chinese launched five brutal offensives between October 1950 and April 1951, but failed to realize their goal of imposing a communist government on an unified Korea. Following the commencement of hostilities, the Chinese exaggerated their own military capabilities and underestimated the firepower and general effectiveness of American forces. But the Chinese army was unable to assimilate modern weaponry and tactics and, facing immense logistical difficulties, could not use its superior numbers to overwhelm United Nations forces. Inaccurate political and military assessments by Chinese leaders served to deny the PRC its goal of a unified Korea while ensuring it would be embroiled in a long and costly war.

This paper looks at the effects of professional basketball on white culture. Traditional scholarship focuses on the impact this has on the African-American community. Very little attention is given to its effects on white America. The focus of this paper is to examine whiteness and to understand how it is socially constructed. In addition, this paper will examine how some elements of black style have been appropriated by white America and changed the definition of whiteness in America. White America's appropriation of limited aspects of black style has been facilitated by the culture that is associated with professional basketball. The economic and social contributions of these athletes have expanded the boundaries of traditional whiteness. This paper presents the argument that the parameters of historical whiteness has expanded to include certain elements of blackness, but this pattern does not alter traditional racist ideology.

Increasing urbanization in a global setting of political and economic instability indicates that urban warfare may well be the major conflict scenario of the 21st century. The United States armed forces are not currently prepared to meet that challenge. The last major urban conflict involving the American military was the Battle of Hue during the Vietnam War. As part of the Tet Offensive in 1968, Communist forces seized control of Hue and held it for nearly a month. Having undergone intensive tactical training for their mission, the enemy, solidly entrenched in buildings of various kinds, offered fierce resistance to the American and South Vietnamese troops who tried to reconquer the city. U.S. Marines bore the brunt of the fighting. Untrained and unequipped for street-fighting, they encountered immense difficulties in clearing Hue. Faulty intelligence, command and control problems, and a lack of proper equipment made the experience a nightmarish one and the human cost was considerable: 147 Marines and seventy-four soldiers lost their lives, while a combined total of 1,364 were wounded. Only through raw determination, superior firepower, and adaptive leadership were the Marines able to prevail. The Battle of Hue offered critical lessons for subsequent military planners. Later conflicts in places such as Somalia and Afghanistan suggested that Hue might be more relevant than expected for contemporary warfare. As a result, the U.S. armed forces have made significant strides toward correcting deficiencies in the areas of doctrine, training, and equipment. However, they remain under-prepared for urban warfare because they are still not training as a joint and combined arms team across the full spectrum of operations. This is in large part due to continued shortfalls in training infrastructure and lack of equipment. U.S. armed forces must continue to maximize urban operations training at every level in order to validate doctrine, learn how to fight, and develop specialized equipment for urban operations.

Much evidence suggests that the cause of lower back pain (LBP) and injury is frequently related to the posture of lifting, the load, muscle fatigue, and other factors. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effect of progressive fatigue on factors that have previously been associated with increased risk of LBP in various occupational settings, during a repetitive lifting task where freestyle lifting technique was utilized. A laboratory experiment was conducted to evaluate several fatigue analysis, electromyography amplitude, kinematic, and kinetic parameters of repetitive freestyle lifting during a 2-hour lifting period. Each of ten (10) young adult male participants lifted a load from floor height to a lowering platform of 76cm height at a rate of 4 lifts/minute. The mass lifted was determined utilizing the psychophysical approach. The task consisted of 8 consecutive 15-minute periods of lifting, before, between, and after which subjective fatigue rating and strength measurements were taken, and during which kinematic variables were recorded. Effect of time, at α=0.05 level, was observed on subjective fatigue rating (p<0.0001) and on static strength (p=0.0184). Subjective fatigue rating increased over time, indicating that the participant "felt" increasingly fatigued as the experiment progressed. Static composite strength decreased an average of 20% from the beginning to the end of the experiment. Effect of lifting posture (semi-squat, semi-stoop, and stoop) was observed on peak trunk flexion angle (p=0.0122), trunk flexion angle at initiation of the lift (p=0.009), and knee angle at initiation of the lift (p=0.0007), indicating that in freestyle lifting, participants assume quantitatively different lifting techniques. A significant effect of the time-posture interaction was observed on the dynamic leg lift floor to knuckle height strength (0.0237), indicating that dynamic strength may change depending upon lifting posture selected. No generalizable effect of the independent variables was observed on the remaining parameters for all participants. Indicators of general physical fatigue, particularly dynamic floor to knuckle height leglift strength and subjective fatigue rating, were observed to possess some significant predictive capability in variation of a number of kinematic and force parameters.

The main objective of this dissertation was to provide researchers interested in the history and evolution of "comparative literature" with a collection of references delineating the evolution of the concept and the development of academic departments dedicated to its study. The paper includes a first section describing the main issues contributing to the "identity crisis" with which studies and departments defining themselves as "comparative" were consistently confronted ever since the term was coined. The "preliminary concepts" section offers an overview of the elements that usually confer a "comparative" quality to a literary study, such as interdisciplinarity and multiculturalism, together with a few relevant definitions (in chronological order) describing the commonly accepted meaning of the term at a particular point in time. The next chapter, "chronological overview," continues the analysis with additional details, references and comments also in chronological order, dividing the matter in sub-chapters dedicated to as many historical periods, from the Antiquity until the mid-20th century. A separate section, offers a review of the most important institutions and publications contributing to the development of the comparative field. The last chapter is a sketch of the current status of the concept and of the institutions dedicated to its study. The research for the present dissertation focused primarily on facts and documents from the European and North American continents. Its main purpose is not to arbitrate the multitude of trends and opinions trying to associate the term with a singular meaning. It merely attempts to provide the reader with a systematic perspective of the subject matter.

The battle of Kursk in the summer of 1943 was a pivotal battle of World War II. The defeat at Kursk placed the Wehrmacht on the permanent strategic defensive on the Eastern Front. The opening of the Soviet archives after 1989 has permitted more thorough analysis of that battle and produced greater appreciation of the Red Armys performance, while casting doubt on the notion that the Germans were close to an operational victory. Preceding the clash, both sides prepared feverishly, attempting to bring the units involved to their maximum capability by replacing personnel, upgrading equipment, and conducting training. The Germans delayed the attack several times to deploy the new armored vehicles. Soviet leaders gathered intelligence from their own sources as well as from ULTRA, which was the codename for British intelligence gained from the German Enigma machine. The Soviets, in anticipation of the onslaught, built a massive and intricate defense. Kursk began on July 4, 1943 with a German attack in the south to gain observation for artillery. The main battle began on July 5 when the Germans attacked both shoulders of the Kursk salient. The fighting was furious. In the north the frontlines quickly stabilized, but in the south German forces made progress. The critical moment occurred when they reached the village of Prokhorovka on July 12. The II SS Panzer Corps and the Soviet Fifth Guards Tank and Fifth Guards Armies fought to a tactical draw with hundreds of tanks lost on both sides. However, the Allied invasion of Sicily prompted Hitler to transfer panzer divisions from Kursk to the Mediterranean Theater, thus seriously reducing the assets available to Field Marshal Erich von Manstein, the commander of the German units in the south. This decision essentially ended the Battle of Kursk. Had Hitler given his subordinates more freedom to destroy the Soviet armored reserves, they might have mitigated the catastrophe. But the Germans at Kursk could not have achieved victory. It was a simple matter of the Soviets outnumbering the Germans in all categories, and the Red Army had improved its capabilities to the point it could execute devastating deep, combined arms operations against the Wehrmacht.