This study examines refugee women's ICT and digital media usage during the Covid-19 pandemic. It aims to ascertain how women in refugee accommodation centres in Hamburg, Germany overcome information precarity due to limited or no internet access when public life primarily moved to the digital world. The discussion in this...
The number of Hispanics in engineering departments at companies and universities differs from the proportion of Hispanics in the US population. Hispanics represented only 8% of the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) workforce in 2020, despite being 17% of the overall workforce. The ethnic disparity in STEM occupations contributes...
In this document, I demonstrate that: 1) Linear basis functions cannot outperform nonlinear ones to represent hand kinematics 2) Nonlinear autoencoders outperform PCA on the dimensionality reduction of hand kinematics, 3) Nonlinear autoencoders outperform PCA in human gait representation and recurrent nonlinear autoencoders can seamlessly express the temporal dynamics, 4)...
Stories and fantasy represent an important aspect of consumer life and comprise a huge marketing enterprise within consumer entertainment. Each year, upwards of $82 billion is spent on books, games, and other fantasy industries in the United States alone. Likewise, fantasy has important implications for consumers’ sense of identity. In...
Stories and fantasy represent an important aspect of consumer life and comprise a huge marketing enterprise within consumer entertainment. Each year, upwards of $82 billion is spent on books, games, and other fantasy industries in the United States alone. Likewise, fantasy has important implications for consumers’ sense of identity. In...
As sound changes advance across large geographic areas, they progress unevenly across populations. The speakers who lead these changes often share macro-social identities, like place or social class affiliations (e.g. Nesbitt 2018; Wagner et al. 2016). But the features undergoing these macro-level sound changes also hold social meanings related to...
To better prepare for earthquakes, we need to know how large they will be, how strong the shaking will be, and how often they will occur. To answer these questions, seismologists look to past earthquakes to better understand future hazards. Earthquakes, however, are complex physical phenomena that occur on timescales...
In the last decade, global mobile data traffic increased by more than a hundred fold times while maintaining essentially the same monthly charge to the average mobile user. Cisco predicts that overall mobile data traffic will continue to grow rapidly at a compound annual growth rate of 60 percent between...
South Africa’s rates of mental, neurological, and substance use disorders are among the highest in sub-Saharan Africa. In 2016, the estimated 12-month prevalence for any psychiatric disorder was 16.2%, or approximately 9.1 million individuals. Despite these elevated rates of psychiatric morbidity, access to mental health treatment is poor: only 27%...
By 2020, there will be more than 200 billion sensor enabled objects world-wide in the Internet of Things (IoT). The biggest challenge of future IoT is to provide ultra scalable wireless access for a massive number of devices. The goal of this thesis is to build up a model for...