This thesis is an investigation into the relationship between two objects on a hillside and the implications of those objects being a church. / Master of Architecture

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Queensland, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.A. in in Security Studies (Homeland Security and Defense))--Naval Postgraduate School, March 2007. / Thesis Advisor(s): Simeral, Robert. "March 2007." "Change in distribution statement for Evolution of regional counterterrorism centers within a national counterterrorism network -- March 2007." Description based on title screen as viewed on Oct. 15, 2008. Includes bibliographical references (p. 125-133). Also available in print.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--York University, 2000. Graduate Programme in Sociology. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 334-354). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/yorku/fullcit?pNQ59138.

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CHDS State/Local / There is widespread consensus among both policymakers and intelligence professionals that domestic counterterrorism efforts remain hampered by the lack of an effective national intelligence network that fully integrates the Homeland's entire intelligence assets and other related Homeland Security capabilities into one national counterterrorism system. The failure to unify our domestic counterterrorism efforts inhibits timely and complete information sharing and the evolution of a more robust Homeland Security prevention and response capacity. To achieve counterterrorism synergy we need a holistic approach that removes the intelligence element from its vacuum and fuses it in the counterterrorism crucible, along with the investigations element and related Homeland Security prevention and response operational elements, in Regional All-Hazards, Disaster and Anti-Terrorism Resource (R.A.D.A.R.) centers. These regional and super-regional R.A.D.A.R. centers can then be united into a National Counterterrorism Network under the auspices of the National Counterterrorism Center and the National Operations Center. Fusing this multi-government level, multi-disciplinary collaboration of intelligence, investigative and operational assets, along with the resources of key private sector groups into one unified organism would eliminate information sharing barriers, and will ensure the most efficient and effective use of Homeland Security resources to prevent and respond to terrorist attacks and natural disasters. / Seattle Police Department (author)civilian.

Medicolegal death investigators (MDIs) are a crucial part of the death investigation process but the profession remains unregulated and lacks a required accreditation or licensing process that many other professions use. Research shows the current medicolegal death investigations system, though a crucial government function, has existing deficits in its functionality that affect service delivery. The current study was based on an educational theory and utilized open ended survey questions. Data from 16 investigators was collected through surveys where relevant information was asked in the context of their situation and questions were specific to the phenomenon being studied. The data was analyzed by identifying individual and group descriptions of the experience to understand the overall meaning of their experience. The investigators interviewed had different experiences and varying beliefs in the importance of their role as an investigator. They were confident in their roles and provided detailed descriptions of their responsibilities. Additionally, investigators do not appear to have any direct issues due to educational differences but did embrace their roles as death investigators with a desire toward ensuring both their personal safety and that of society. Although many have acquired training as a result of their employment, they did not feel that the lack of prior training was a hindrance. This study contributes to the literature by providing data for consideration when developing regulations promoting standards within the system. This includes the health and safety of medicolegal death investigators and filling the gap of recognizing the need for standardized regulations by identifying the need for uniform training and safety practices.

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Prosopagnosia is defined as a profound deficit in facial identification which can be either acquired due to brain damage or is present from birth, i.e. congenital. Normally, faces and objects are processed in different parts of the inferotemporal cortex by distinct cortical systems for face vs. object recognition, an association of function and location. Accordingly, in acquired prosopagnosia locally restricted damage can lead to specific deficits in face recognition. However, in congenital prosopagnosia faces and objects are also processed in spatially separated areas. Accordingly, the face recognition deficit in congenital prosopagnosia can not be solely explained by the association of function and location. Rather, this observation raises the question why and how such an association evolves at all. So far, no quantitative or computational model of congenital prosopagnosia has been proposed and models of acquired prosopagnosia have focused on changes in the information processing taking place after in icting some kind of \damage" to the system. To model congenital prosopagnosia, it is thus necessary to understand how face processing in congenital prosopagnosia differs from normal face processing, how differences in neuroanatomical development can give rise to differences in processing and last but not least why facial identification requires a specialized cortical processing system in the first place. In this work, a computational model of congenital prosopagnosia is derived from formal considerations, implemented in artificial neural network models of facial information encoding, and tested in experiments with prosopagnosic subjects. The main hypothesis is that the deficit in congenital prosopagnosia is caused by a failure to obtain adequate descriptions of individual faces: A predisposition towards a reduced structural connectivity in visual cortical areas enforces descriptions of visual stimuli that lack the amount of detail necessary to distinguish a specific exemplar from its population, i.e. achieve a successful identification. Formally recognition tasks can be divided into identification tasks (separating a single individual from its sampling population) and classification tasks (partitioning the full object space into distinct classes). It is shown that a high-dimensionality in the sensory representation facilitates individuation (\blessing of dimensionality"), but complicates estimation of object class representations (\curse of dimensionality"). The dimensionality of representations is then studied explicitly in a neural network model of facial encoding. Whereas optimal encoding entails a \holistic" (high-dimensional) representation, a constraint on the network connectivity induces a decomposition of faces into localized, \featural" (low-dimensional) parts. In an experimental validation, the perceptual deficit in congenital prosopagnosia was limited to holistic face manipulations and didn't extend to featural manipulations. Finally, an extensive and detailed investigation of face and object recognition in congenital prosopagnosia enabled a better behavioral characterization and the identification of subtypes of the deficit. In contrast to previous models of prosopagnosia, here the developmental aspect of congenital prosopagnosia is incorporated explicitly into the model, quantitative arguments for a deficit that is task specific (identification) - and not necessarily domain specific (faces) - are provided for synthetic as well as real data (face images), and the model is validated empirically in experiments with prosopagnosic subjects.