Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Access To Prostate-Specific Antigen Testing And Mortality Among Men With Prostate Cancer, Hari S. Iyer, Benjamin V. Stone, Charlotte Roscoe, Mei Chin Hsieh, Antoinette M. Stroup, Charles L. Wiggins, Fredrick R. Schumacher, Scarlett L. Gomez, Timothy R. Rebbeck, Quoc Dien Trinh

School of Public Health Faculty Publications

Importance: Prostate-specific antigen (PSA) screening for prostate cancer is controversial but may be associated with benefit for certain high-risk groups. Objectives: To evaluate associations of county-level PSA screening prevalence with prostate cancer outcomes, as well as variation by sociodemographic and clinical factors. Design, Setting, and Participants: This cohort study used data from cancer registries based in 8 US states on Hispanic, non-Hispanic Black, and non-Hispanic White men aged 40 to 99 years who received a diagnosis of prostate cancer between January 1, 2000, and December 31, 2015. Participants were followed up until death or censored after 10 years or December …

Rock Glaciers In Utah, Scott Hotaling, Kendall Becker, Matthew Morriss

All Current Publications

Utah’s primary water supply––winter snowpack––is in decline due to climate warming coupled with more precipitation falling as rain instead of snow. As snowpack dwindles, other sources of cold stream water, such as rock glaciers, will become more important. Rock glaciers contain significant volumes of internal ice covered by debris. This internal ice provides cold meltwater to mountain streams, sustaining flows in summer and supporting biodiversity. Rock glaciers are common in Utah’s mountains and are projected to be more stable under climate change than Utah’s snowpack. Thus, rock glaciers are likely to persist in their current form even as snowpack volumes …

Approval Letter For The Butte Priority Soils Operable Unit (Bpsou) Draft Final Uncontrolled Surface Flow Areas Remedial Design (Rd) Work Plan, Draft Bpsou Uncontrolled Surface Flow Areas Pre-Design Investigation (Pdi) Work Plan, 2023 Uncontrolled Surface Flow Area Soil Characterization Quality Assurance Project Plan (Qapp) [Dated January 25, 2024], Molly Roby

Silver Bow Creek/Butte Area Superfund Site

No abstract provided.

Cost Modeling Of Provision C.3 Green Stormwater Infrastructure Requirements For Residential Development In Concord, California, James Henry Mizutani

Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

To assist the city of Concord in achieving its housing goals as presented in its general plan, while still meeting the stormwater discharge requirements laid out in the city’s municipal discharge permit, I worked with local developers and consultants to create a spreadsheet modeling tool that allows housing developers to estimate the total cost of green stormwater infrastructure needed to comply with local regulations.

This report contains a summary of the conditions leading to the necessity of this tool, the steps the tool takes that go beyond existing models, a description of how the model operates, instructions on how to …

Ruling Out A Saddle-Point Mechanism Of Ionization In Intermediate-Energy Ion-Atom Collisions, K. H. Spicer, C. T. Plowman, N. W. Antonio, M. S. Schöffler, Michael Schulz, A. S. Kadyrov

Physics Faculty Research & Creative Works

Is there a saddle-point mechanism for ionization in intermediate-energy ion-atom collisions Since Olson [Phys. Rev. A 33, 4397 (1986)0556-279110.1103/PhysRevA.33.4397] proposed the idea that the electrons stranded in the potential saddle between the two Coulomb centers dominate the ejected-electron spectra, multiple experimental and theoretical attempts have been made to answer this question. However, the topic has remained controversial. Here we provide a theoretical analysis of this question which can contribute significantly to a definitive answer, at least for intermediate and large projectile energies. To this end we calculate the energy and angular distribution of electrons emitted in proton-helium collisions. We use …

Learning Statistics With R: A Tutorial For Psychology Students And Other Beginners, Leslie Bain

ATU Faculty OER Book Reviews

Review of OER Statistics textbook by Danielle Navarro, available at https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/textbooks/learning-statistics-with-r-a-tutorial-for-psychology-students-and-other-beginners

For Discrete-Time Linear Dynamical Systems Under Interval Uncertainty, Predicting Two Moments Ahead Is Np-Hard, Luc Jaulin, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In the first approximation, when changes are small, most real-world systems are described by linear dynamical equations. If we know the initial state of the system, and we know its dynamics, then we can, in principle, predict the system's state many moments ahead. In practice, however, we usually know both the initial state and the coefficients of the system's dynamics with some uncertainty. Frequently, we encounter interval uncertainty, when for each parameter, we only know its range, but we have no information about the probability of different values from this range. In such situations, we want to know the range …

What To Do If An Inflexible Tolerance Problem Has No Solutions: Probabilistic Justification Of Piegat's Semi-Heuristic Idea, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In many practical situations, it is desirable to select the control parameters x1, ..., xn in such a way that the resulting quantities y1, ..., ym of the system lie within desired ranges. In such situations, we usually know the general formulas describing the dependence of yi on xj, but the coefficients of these formulas are usually only known with interval uncertainty. In such a situation, we want to find the tuples for which all yi's are in the desired intervals for all possible tuples of coefficients. But what if no such parameters are possible? Since we cannot guarantee the …

How To Make Ai More Reliable, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

One of the reasons why the results of the current AI methods (especially deep-learning-based methods) are not absolutely reliable is that, in contrast to more traditional data processing techniques which are based on solid mathematical and statistical foundations, modern AI techniques use a lot of semi-heuristic methods. These methods have been, in many cases, empirically successful, but the absence of solid justification makes us less certain that these methods will work in other cases as well. To make AI more reliable, it is therefore necessary to provide mathematical foundations for the current semi-heuristic techniques. In this paper, we show that …

Why Magenta Is Not A Real Color, And How It Is Related To Fuzzy Control And Quantum Computing, Victor L. Timchenko, Yuriy P. Kondratenko, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

It is well known that every color can be represented as a combination of three basic colors: red, green, and blue. In particular, we can get several colors by combining two of the basic colors. Interestingly, while a combination of two neighboring colors leads to a color that corresponds to a certain frequency, the combination of two non-neighboring colors -- red and blue -- leads to magenta, a color that does not correspond to any frequency. In this paper, we provide a simple explanation for this phenomenon, and we also show that a similar phenomenon happens in two other areas …

How To Propagate Uncertainty Via Ai Algorithms, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Any data processing starts with measurement results. Measurement results are never absolutely accurate. Because of this measurement uncertainty, the results of processing measurement results are, in general, somewhat different from what we would have obtained if we knew the exact values of the measured quantities. To make a decision based on the result of data processing, we need to know how accurate is this result, i.e., we need to propagate the measurement uncertainty through the data processing algorithm. There are many techniques for uncertainty propagation. Usually, they involve applying the same data processing algorithm several times to appropriately modified data. …

Decentralized Optimization Over Slowly Time-Varying Graphs: Algorithms And Lower Bounds, Dmitry Metelev, Aleksandr Beznosikov, Alexander Rogozin, Alexander Gasnikov, Anton Proskurnikov

Machine Learning Faculty Publications

We consider a decentralized convex unconstrained optimization problem, where the cost function can be decomposed into a sum of strongly convex and smooth functions, associated with individual agents, interacting over a static or time-varying network. Our main concern is the convergence rate of first-order optimization algorithms as a function of the network’s graph, more specifically, of the condition numbers of gossip matrices. We are interested in the case when the network is time-varying but the rate of changes is restricted. We study two cases: randomly changing network satisfying Markov property and a network changing in a deterministic manner. For the …

Public Data Resources And Total Factor Productivity Of Enterprises: A Quasi-Natural Experiment Based On Local Government Data Opening, Wuping Wu, Qiheng Li, Liuyi Zhang, Yue Zhao

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

The opening of public data is the government’s major strategic move to release the value of data factor. However, whether these data resources are used by the public to release their value needs to be empirically tested. Therefore, based on the perspective of high-quality development of firms, this paper examines the relation between open public data and firms’ total factor productivity so as to reflect the value of public data resources in driving force of promoting firms’ high-quality development. Taking A-share listed firms from 2010 to 2019 as samples, using a natural experiment based on the launch of the local …

Prescribed-Time Nash Equilibrium Seeking For Pursuit-Evasion Game, Lei Xue, Jianfeng Ye, Yongbao Wu, Jian Liu, D. C. Wunsch

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Dear Editor, this letter is concerned with prescribed-time Nash equilibrium (PTNE) seeking problem in a pursuit-evasion game (PEG) involving agents with second-order dynamics. In order to achieve the prior given and user-defined convergence time for the PEG, a PTNE seeking algorithm has been developed to facilitate collaboration among multiple pursuers for capturing the evader without the need for any global information. Then, it is theoretically proved that the prescribed-time convergence of the designed algorithm for achieving Nash equilibrium of PEG. Eventually, the effectiveness of the PTNE method was validated by numerical simulation results.

Assessing The Impact Of Hurricane Fiona On The Coast Of Pei National Park And Implications For The Effectiveness Of Beach-Dune Management Policies, Robin Davidson-Arnott, Jeff Ollerhead, Elizabeth George, Chris Houser, Bernard Bauer, Patrick Hesp, Ian Walker, Irene Delagado-Fernandez, Danika Van Proosdij

Earth & Environmental Sciences Publications

The impact of waves, storm surge, and aeolian transport associated with Post-tropical Storm Fiona (offshore significant wave height ∽ 8 m, storm surge up to 2 m) on the sandy beaches and foredunes of the north shore of Prince Edward Island National Park (PEINP), Canada, are assessed. Management policies and practices, as they apply to sandy beach systems within PEINP, are reviewed in the context of the shoreline changes attributed to Fiona. The effectiveness of these policies and practices are evaluated to inform the potential performance of beach-foredune systems as natural protection measures that mitigate the impacts of large-magnitude storms …

Introduction To Statistical Thinking, Leslie Bain

ATU Faculty OER Book Reviews

Review of OER Statistics textbook by Benjamin Yakir, available at https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/textbooks/introduction-to-statistical-thinking

A Pilot Study On Particulate Matter Concentrations From Cooking And Its Effects On Indoor Air Pollution In A Mexican American Household In Mission, South Texas, Usa, Sai Deepak Pinakana, Carlos Garcia Patlan, Esmeralda Mendez, Amit U. Raysoni

School of Earth, Environmental, and Marine Sciences Faculty Publications and Presentations

This pilot study focuses on particulate matter (PM) while cooking in a South Texan household. Dishes such as Beef, Burger, Fish, Chicken, Egg Sandwich, and Hotdog were prepared. Indoor PM levels were compared with outdoor PM levels. A DustTrak DRX was used to monitor the PM released during the cooking process. PM2.5 levels were highest while cooking beef, 162.79 + 209.62 μg m−3. Hot Dog preparation resulted in the lowest PM2.5 concentration of 27.72 + 5.58 μg m−3. Indoor PM2.5 levels were observed to be greater in contrast to outdoor levels when compared to the outdoor levels (96 words).

An Index Of Biotic Integrity For Macroinvertebrate Stream Bioassessment Conducted By Community Scientists, Patrick M. Edwards, Daniel Bedell, Shannon Hubler, Chad A. Larson, Kate H. Macneale, Elisa Mickelson, Chris Prescott, Elinore Webb, Jo Wilhelm

Environmental Science and Management Faculty Publications and Presentations

Community science bioassessment has great potential to inform comprehensive stream management plans, but regional analytical tools are needed to evaluate macroinvertebrate data collected through community science programs. To this end, we modified a pre-existing professional index of biotic integrity (IBI) to create a community science IBI (CS-IBI), designed for stream macroinvertebrate data collected by community scientists with minimal training. We used data collected by both professional and community scientists to develop, calibrate, and validate the CS-IBI at 76 streamsites in the Puget Lowland andWillamette Valley ecoregions of the PacificNorthwest in theUnited States. Community science data were taxonomically coarser andmore variable …

Hydrothermal Synthesis Of (C5h14n2)[Cocl4]⸳0.5h2o: Crystal Structure, Spectroscopic Characterization, Thermal Behavior, Magnetic Properties And Biological Evaluation, Sandra Walha, Noureddine Mhadhbi, Basem F. Ali, Abdellah Kaiba, Ahlem Guesmi, Wesam Abd El-Fattah, Naoufel Ben Hamadi, Mark M. Turnbull, Ferdinando Costantino, Houcine Naïli

Chemistry

The organic-inorganic compound (C₅H₁₄N₂)[CoCl₄]⸳0.5H₂O, I, was characterized by various physicochemical techniques. The X-ray diffraction analysis revealed that the compound crystallizes in the centrosymmetric space group C2/c of the monoclinic system. The atomic arrangement the Co(II) complex is built from isolated [CoCl₄]^2– anions, 1-methylpiperazine-1,4-diium [C₅H₁₄N₂]²⁺ cations and free water molecules. The crystal structure study showed that the cohesion of I is assured through N–H···Cl and N–H···O hydrogen bonds giving birth to a 3-D architecture. Hirshfeld surface analysis revealed that Cl···H/H···Cl and …

Enhancing Government Service Delivery: A Case Study Of Acqar Implementation And Lessons Learned From Chatgpt Integration In A Singapore Government Agency, Hui Shan Lee, Shankararaman, Venky, Eng Lieh Ouh

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This paper presents the pilot implementation of AI Based Citizen Question-Answer Recommender (ACQAR) as an attempt to enhance citizen service delivery within a Singaporean government agency. Drawing insights from previous studies on the Empath library's use in Service Level Agreement (SLA) prediction and the implementation of the Citizen Question-Answer system (CQAS), we redesigned the pilot system, ACQAR. ACQAR integrates the outputs from Empath X SLA predictor and CQAS as essential inputs to the ChatGPT engine, creating contextually aware responses for customer service officers to use as responses to the citizens.Empath X SLA predictor anticipates the expected service response time based …

Agricultural Groundcover Update May 2024, Justin Laycock

Natural resources published reports

• In May, over 9% (1,410,000 ha) of the arable farmland in the south-west of Western Australia had less than 50% vegetative groundcover, which is inadequate to prevent wind erosion.
• Northern grainbelt had the highest risk of wind erosion and over 26% of this farmland had inadequate groundcover, predominantly found on landscapes known for sandy soils.
• About 1.3% (208,900 ha) of arable land had a high to very high risk of wind erosion because groundcover was less than 30%. Half of this land was in the West Midlands Ag Soil Zone.

Agricultural Groundcover Update April 2024, Justin Laycock

Natural resources published reports

• In April, over 12% (1,876,000 ha) of the arable farmland in the south-west of Western Australia had less than 50% vegetative groundcover, which is inadequate to prevent wind erosion.
• Northern grainbelt had the highest risk of wind erosion and over 26% of this farmland had inadequate groundcover, predominantly found on landscapes known for sandy soils.
• About 1.5% (238,900 ha) of arable land had a high to very high risk of wind erosion because groundcover was less than 30%.

College Of Saint Benedict And Saint John's University Fy2023 Greenhouse Gas Emissions Inventory, Csb+Sju Office Of Sustainability

Sustainability Office Publications

The College of Saint Benedict (CSB) and Saint John’s University (SJU) Office of Sustainability conducted a comprehensive Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Inventory that includes emissions from both CSB and SJU campuses. This report details GHG emissions for Fiscal Year (FY) 2023 (July 1, 2022-June 30, 2023) in Metric Tons of Carbon Dioxide Equivalents (MTCO2e), the standard unit of measurement used to track and report GHG emissions based on their global warming potential. Data was collected, organized, and analyzed by staff in the CSB and SJU Sustainability Office.

On The Ratio-Type Family Of Copulas, Farid El Ktaibi, Rachid Bentoumi, Mhamed Mesfioui

All Works

Investigating dependence structures across various fields holds paramount importance. Consequently, the creation of new copula families plays a crucial role in developing more flexible stochastic models that address the limitations of traditional and sometimes impractical assumptions. The present article derives some reasonable conditions for validating a copula of the ratio-type form (Formula presented.). It includes numerous examples and discusses the admissible range of parameter (Formula presented.), showcasing the diversity of copulas generated through this framework, such as Archimedean, non-Archimedean, positive dependent, and negative dependent copulas. The exploration extends to the upper bound of a general family of copulas, (Formula presented.), …

Mega-Projects, Cumulative Impacts, & Indigenous Nationhood On The Multinational Salish Sea, Natalie J.K. Baloy, Isabella Pipp

Institute Publications

In the Salish Sea, one of the major ports for today’s ships is Roberts Bank Superport, named for Henry Roberts (Vancouver’s predecessor), run by the Vancouver Fraser Port Authority, and located just north of the Canada-US border. In 2023, the Government of Canada and the Province of BC approved the Roberts Bank Terminal 2 (RBT2) project which will expand the port by building a second artificial island, adding three berths to accommodate increased capacity for container cargo.

Two court cases this year will challenge the Government of Canada RBT2 approval. One, issued by Ecojustice in alliance with several environmental organizations, …

Why Empirical Membership Functions Are Well-Approximated By Piecewise Quadratic Functions: Theoretical Explanation For Empirical Formulas Of Novak's Fuzzy Natural Logic, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Empirical analysis shows that membership functions describing expert opinions have a shape that is well described by a smooth combination of two quadratic segments. In this paper, we provide a theoretical explanation for this empirical phenomenon.

Why Fully Consistent Quantum Field Theories Require That The Space-Time Be At Least 10-Dimensional: A Commonsense Field-Based Explanation, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

It is known that quantum field theories that describe fields in our usual 4-dimensional space-times are not fully consistent: they predict meaningless infinite values for some physical quantities. There are some known tricks to avoid such infinities, but it is definitely desirable to have a fully consistent theory, a theory that would produce correct results without having to use additional tricks. It turns out that the only way to have such a theory is to consider space-times of higher dimensions, the smallest of which is 10. There are complex mathematical reasons for why 10 is the smallest such dimension. However, …

Why Is Grade Distribution Often Bimodal? Why Individualized Teaching Adds Two Sigmas To The Average Grade? And How Are These Facts Related?, Christian Servin, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

To make education more effective, to better use emerging technologies in education, we need to better understand the education process, to gain insights on this process. How can we check whether a new idea is indeed a useful insight? A natural criterion is that the new idea should explain some previously-difficult-to-explain empirical phenomenon. Since one of the main advantages of emerging educational technologies -- such as AI -- is the possibility of individualized education, a natural phenomenon to explain is the fact -- discovered by Benjamin Bloom -- that individualization adds two sigmas to the average grade. In this paper, …

Towards A More Subtle (And Hopefully More Adequate) Fuzzy "And"-Operation: Normalization-Invariant Multi-Input Aggregation Operators, Yusuf Güven, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Many reasonable conditions have been formulated for a fuzzy "and"-operation: idempotency, commutativity, associativity, etc. It is known that the only "and"-operation that satisfies all these conditions is minimum, but minimum is not the most adequate description of expert's "and", and it often does not lead to the best control or the best decision. Many other more adequate "and"-operations (t-norms) have been proposed and effectively used, but they do not satisfy the natural idempotency condition. In this paper, we show that a small relaxation of the usual description of "and"-operations leads to the possibility of non-minimum idempotent operations. We also show …

Refining Chatgpt-Generated Code: Characterizing And Mitigating Code Quality Issues, Yue Liu, Thanh Le-Cong, Ratnadira Widyasari, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Since its introduction in November 2022, ChatGPT has rapidly gained popularity due to its remarkable ability in language understanding and human-like responses. ChatGPT, based on GPT-3.5 architecture, has shown great promise for revolutionizing various research fields, including code generation. However, the reliability and quality of code generated by ChatGPT remain unexplored, raising concerns about potential risks associated with the widespread use of ChatGPT-driven code generation.In this article, we systematically study the quality of 4,066 ChatGPT-generated programs of code implemented in two popular programming languages, i.e., Java and Python, for 2,033 programming tasks. The goal of this work is threefold. First, …