Optical scan voting systems are ubiquitous. Unfortunately, optical scan technology is vulnerable to failures that can result in miscounted votes and lost confidence. While manual counts may be able to detect these failures, counting all the ballots by hand is in many situations impractical and prohibitively expensive. In this paper, we present a novel approach for examining a large set of ballo...

This paper examines the motivations for the construction of consumer decision tools (CDTs). CDTs are Web-based decision support systems aimed at improving the quality of consumer decisions. CDTs are useful for high involvement choices, such as car or university programme selection, where the consumer is strongly affected by the outcome. Firms will supply CDTs only when they desire informed, mut...

This paper investigates bloatware bundling and product pricing decisions of a monopolistic firm when consumers can remove the bloatware from their electronic devices after purchase. We show conditions under which it is optimal for the firm not to bundle bloatware with their products. Furthermore, we show that even if the firm can make it harder for consumers to remove bloatware, the firm is not...

Solar sailing is a proposed means of space propulsion in which a reflective surface collects momentum from solar photons to accelerate a vehicle. The current trend within the solar sailing community is to increase sail size as solar sailing technologies advance, allowing for larger payloads and higher accelerations. However, with the miniaturization of modern payloads, sail sizes can be dramati...

There are methods to increase fertilizer nitrogen use efficiency through optical sensor-based nitrogen application; however, the sensors are expensive and cost prohibitive to farmers in the developing world. This study evaluated a novel, reduced cost, prototype, and optical sensor to determine if it could be used with the same level of accuracy as a commercial sensor. The stability of the proto...

Global connectivity cannot be guaranteed by terrestrial networks due to the lack of infrastructure in rural areas. Neither can satellite networks assure this due to lack of signal penetration and capacity coverage issues in densely populated areas. To bridge this gap, we propose an Orthogonal Frequency Domain (OFDM) based hybrid architecture where users are provided service by existing mobile n...

In this paper, we propose an effective search procedure that interleaves two steps: subproblem generation and subproblem solution. We mainly focus on the first part. It consists of a variable domain value ranking based on reduced costs. Exploiting the ranking, we generate, in a Limited Discrepancy Search tree, the most promising subproblems first. An interesting result is that reduced costs pro...

J.S. Neubauer 1 20 Annual AIAA/USU Conference on Small Satellites The vast foreseeable benefits of on-orbit servicing to current and future space systems have sparked the development of both large-scale servicing spacecraft and small-scale technology demonstration platforms. The latter provide the ability to prove certain crucial technologies more efficiently than their larger counterparts, due...

This chapter describes four systems that introduce new pedagogy, address inequities in the classroom and show improved learning with reduced cost. The first system supports inquiry and casebased learning, moving students towards more active learning, engagement, and hypothesis construction. The next system describes mathematics and geometry tutors that positively influence a student’s confidenc...

Software services offer many opportunities like reduced cost for IT infrastructure. They also introduce new risks, for example the clients lose control over their data. While data can be secured against external threats using standard techniques, the service providers themselves have to be trusted to ensure privacy. In this paper, we examine methods that can increase the level of privacy a serv...