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This thesis investigates the issues of implementing multi-sensor imaging system for surveillance applications. Three topics for the fusion of infrared and electro-optic images are studied, i.e. registration, fusion, and evaluation. The first topic is the image registration or alignment, which is to associate corresponding pixels in multiple images to the same physical point in the scene. A trajectory-based method for registering infrared and electro-optic video sequences is proposed in this study. The initial registration parameters are derived from matching the trajectories across the...

Private Higher Education and the Labor Market in China focuses on Chinese private higher education institutions and investigates their institutional management efforts in linking private higher education to the labor market. The dissertation firstly describes and analyzes how these mostly demand-absorbing institutions include elements aimed at meeting labor market demands in their mission statements, and how they improve student employability and bridge graduates and employers through job-oriented fields of study provision, educational delivery, career services, as well as networking and partn...

As the sun set on the 20th century, a new age dawned in Japan. This new era, symbolized by the postmodern city of Tokyo, has ushered in not only technological innovation and economic prowess, but changing attitudes and values among Japanese young people. This transformation is not an uncommon or even new phenomenon, but simply the result of modern life. And one of the symptoms of modernity is the prevalence of an “ethics of materialism,” the ever-increasing concern for the acquisition of wealth and commodity goods, sometimes at the expense of the concern for human life itself. Walter Benja...

This study entitled ‘State sovereignty versus individual human rights’ is a critical reflection of the relationship between sovereignty and (individual) human rights especially as it related to the Rwandan genocide in which about a million people perished in only 100 days. The fact that Rwanda government conducted a genocide against its citizens and continued to enjoy the benefits of sovereign rights of independent states such as the protection from foreign interference, well knowing that peoples rights were being violated, moved me to question the legitimacy of state sovereignty of an abusive...

There exists a need for the creation of an objective system for measuring facial attractiveness and along with it a detailed mathematical analysis and understanding of facial sexual dimorphism. Both the areas of ophthalmic and facial plastic and reconstructive surgery and the areas of facial attractiveness and recognition research in psychology would greatly benefit from achieving these goals. The objective of this work has been to: develop and test a system for measuring facial attractiveness in an objective manner; and analyze orbital and facial sexual dimorphism. A facial overlay syste...

The delayed development of the Islamic world, in defiance of the formulaic approaches long favored by economists, suggests that the traditional Sharia and Islamic values and principles are at least partially responsible for the region’s persistent backwardness. By analyzing the impact of the legal regime of the Sharia on Saudi Arabia during the Arab Oil Bust of the 1980s, this thesis concludes that Islamic social values and the Sharia’s de facto role as an uncodified pre-emptive Arab common law implemented with high regard to precedent by ulama with extraordinary power of judicial review ha...

Young stars are surrounded by massive, rotating disks of dust and gas, which supply a reservoir of material that may be incorporated into planets or accreted onto the central star. In this dissertation, I use high angular resolution observations at a range of wavelengths to understand the structure, ubiquity, and evolutionary timescales of protoplanetary disks. First, I describe a study of Class I protostars, objects believed to be at an evolutionary stage between collapsing spherical clouds and fully-assembled young stars surrounded by protoplanetary disks. I use a Monte Carlo ra...

We study the properties of star-forming galaxies at redshift z~2, an era in which a substantial fraction of the stellar mass in the universe formed. Using 114 near-IR spectra of the H-alpha and [N II] emission lines and model spectral energy distributions fit to rest-frame UV through IR photometry, we examine the galaxies' star formation properties, dynamical masses and velocity dispersions, spatially resolved kinematics, outflow properties, and metallicities as a function of stellar mass and age. While the stellar masses of the galaxies in our sample vary by a factor of ~500, dynami...

For many applications, including power generation, aerospace and the automobile industry, high temperature wear provides serious difficulties where two or more surfaces move or slide relative to one another. In aerospace, for example, demands for more powerful, efficient engines operating at ever higher temperatures, mean that conventional lubrication is no longer sufficient to prevent direct contact between metallic sliding surfaces, accelerating wear. However, one high temperature phenomenon observed to reduce metallic contact, and thus wear and friction, is the formation of ‘glazes’,essen...

Many school districts across this great nation are facing serious patterns of underachievement of students who do not fit well in a mainstream educational environment. The purpose of this qualitative phenomenological research study was to explore the perceptions and experiences of graduates from a credit-recovery nontraditional alternative high school that influenced his or her graduation. Nationally, many high school students are not earning sufficient credits to remain on grade level with their freshman level cohort. These at-risk students need options with stronger incentives to obtain high...