Such a Nice Man

In this novel, Gregory "Go" Overman, a Washington D.C. stock analyst, fears for the welfare of his beloved sister when she falls for a Florida billionaire with a shady reputation. While attempting to find evidence of the billionaire's chicanery, he gets involved with a young hooker his sister is attempting to rehabilitate. Beginning with a lie to his sister, Go's lust pulls him to such a low moral point he wonders if he's become no better than his greedy antagonist. But when tragedy strikes, he unearths secrets that enable him to avenge his sister and redeem himself. This novel is written from the viewpoint of a first-person narrator and contains four sections totaling forty-eight chapters. ^

A high efficient biometrics approach for unconstrained iris segmentation and recognition

This dissertation develops an innovative approach towards less-constrained iris biometrics. Two major contributions are made in this research endeavor: (1) Designed an award-winning segmentation algorithm in the less-constrained environment where image acquisition is made of subjects on the move and taken under visible lighting conditions, and (2) Developed a pioneering iris biometrics method coupling segmentation and recognition of the iris based on video of moving persons under different acquisitions scenarios. The first part of the dissertation introduces a robust and fast segmentation approach using still images contained in the UBIRIS (version 2) noisy iris database. The results show accuracy estimated at 98% when using 500 randomly selected images from the UBIRIS.v2 partial database, and estimated at 97% in a Noisy Iris Challenge Evaluation (NICE.I) in an international competition that involved 97 participants worldwide involving 35 countries, ranking this research group in sixth position. This accuracy is achieved with a processing speed nearing real time. The second part of this dissertation presents an innovative segmentation and recognition approach using video-based iris images. Following the segmentation stage which delineates the iris region through a novel segmentation strategy, some pioneering experiments on the recognition stage of the less-constrained video iris biometrics have been accomplished. In the video-based and less-constrained iris recognition, the test or subject iris videos/images and the enrolled iris images are acquired with different acquisition systems. In the matching step, the verification/identification result was accomplished by comparing the similarity distance of encoded signature from test images with each of the signature dataset from the enrolled iris images. With the improvements gained, the results proved to be highly accurate under the unconstrained environment which is more challenging. This has led to a false acceptance rate (FAR) of 0% and a false rejection rate (FRR) of 17.64% for 85 tested users with 305 test images from the video, which shows great promise and high practical implications for iris biometrics research and system design.

In My Opinion… If I Were a Carpenter

Starting a career in the hospitality travel and tourism industries today requires more than a nice smile, a love of people and a willingness to help solve their problems technology and number crunching are "must have" capabilities for up-and-coming managers graduating from hospitality and tourism pro- grams The article provides student counselors and mentors insights from industry leaders, career path choices, and questions that applicants should be asking in the decision-making process.

A Modified Resource Distribution Fairness Measure

An important issue of resource distribution is the fairness of the distribution. For example, computer network management wishes to distribute network resource fairly to its users. To describe the fairness of the resource distribution, a quantitative fairness score function was proposed in 1984 by Jain et al. The purpose of this paper is to propose a modified network sharing fairness function so that the users can be treated differently according to their priority levels. The mathematical properties are discussed. The proposed fairness score function keeps all the nice properties of and provides better performance when the network users have different priority levels.