University of North Carolina at Charlotte

About: University of North Carolina at Charlotte is a education organization based out in Charlotte, North Carolina, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Poison control. The organization has 8772 authors who have published 22239 publications receiving 562529 citations. The organization is also known as: UNC Charlotte & UNCC.

Poetic Forms and Structures in Qualitative Health Research

Abstract: In this article, the author explores the uses of poetic forms in qualitative health research, analyzing the matically a poem written from a patient's perspective of being treated in an emergency room. From the themes identified, he created two “research poems” using two formal poetic structures: the French-Malaysian pantoum, and the Japanese-inspired American tanka. The author contextualizes this research through an exploration of the arts and poetry as qualitative research.

Forest species diversity reduces disease risk in a generalist plant pathogen invasion

Abstract: Empirical evidence suggests that biodiversity loss can increase disease transmission, yet our understanding of thediversity-disease hypothesisfor generalist pathogens in natural ecosystems is limited. We used a landscape epidemiological approach to examine two scenarios regarding diversity effects on the emerging plant pathogen Phytophthora ramorum across a broad, heterogeneous ecoregion: (1) an amplification effect exists where disease risk is greater in areas with higher plant diversity due to the pathogens wide host range, or (2) a dilution effect where risk is reduced with increasing diversity due to lower competency of alternative hosts. We found evidence for pathogen dilution, whereby disease risk was lower in sites with higher species diversity, after accounting for potentially confounding effects of host density and landscape heterogeneity. Our results suggest that although nearly all plants in the ecosystem are hosts, alternative hosts may dilute disease transmission by competent hosts, thereby buffering forest health from infectious disease.

The Psychological Effects of Solitary Confinement on Prisoners in Supermax Units: Reviewing What We Know and Recommending What Should Change

Abstract: This article examines the psychological consequences of short- and long-term solitary confinement for prisoners in the United States subjected to administrative or disciplinary segregation. Particular attention is paid to the use of secure housing units, alternatively known as control units or supermax units. These correctional entities allow for the isolation of convicts under conditions that offer little sensory stimulation and minimal opportunities for interaction with other people. The circumstances typically found in these units and the heightened potential for the abuse of prisoners are described. The connections between internment and mental illness-as well as isolation and race, gender, and class-are explored. A set of recommendations for the reform of secure housing is presented.

Integration of Kano's Model Into QFD for Multiple Product Design

Abstract: Simultaneous multiple product design is essential to meet customer expectations faster and with a focus on shortening life cycles, and new methodologies are needed to address the complexities related to it. quality function deployment (QFD) can help gather customer needs and link them to product design. However, understanding customer needs accurately is a challenge for traditional QFD analysis, and for this reason, Kano's model of customer satisfaction is associated with QFD in the literature. However, incorporating the results of Kano's model into QFD presents another challenge. The objective of this research is to provide a step-by-step methodology that fine-tunes the QFD method by combining Kano's model and QFD in a robust manner, from the perspective of simultaneous multiple product design. This research also includes an application of this proposed methodology on cockpit weather information system (CWIS) design, a part of NASA's Aviation Weather Information (AWIN) project, to demonstrate its usefulness

Query Specific Rank Fusion for Image Retrieval

Abstract: Recently two lines of image retrieval algorithms demonstrate excellent scalability: 1) local features indexed by a vocabulary tree, and 2) holistic features indexed by compact hashing codes Although both of them are able to search visually similar imageseffectively, their retrieval precision may vary dramatically among queries Therefore, combining these two types of methods is expected to further enhance the retrieval precision However, the feature characteristics and the algorithmic procedures of these methods are dramatically different, which is very challenging for the feature-level fusion This motivates us to investigate how to fuse the ordered retrieval sets, ie, the ranks of images, given by multiple retrieval methods, to boost the retrieval precision without sacrificing theirscalability In this paper, we model retrieval ranks as graphs of candidate images and propose a graph-based query specific fusion approach, where multiple graphs are merged and reranked by conducting a link analysis on a fused graph The retrieval quality of an individual method is measured on-the-fly by assessing the consistency of the top candidates’ nearest neighborhoods Hence, it iscapable of adaptively integrating the strengths of the retrieval methods using local or holistic features for different query images This proposed method does not need any supervision, has few parameters, and is easy to implement Extensive and thorough experiments have been conducted on four public datasets, ie, the UKbench , Corel-5K , Holidays and the large-scale San Francisco Landmarks datasets Our proposed method has achieved very competitive performance, including state-of-the-art results on several data sets, eg, the N-S score 383 for UKbench