Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

A New Model For Predicting Probabilities Of Viable Pregnancy And Multiple Gestations For I̲N̲ V̲I̲T̲R̲O̲ Fertilization, Ray Vernon Haning Jr.

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

In vitro fertilization (IVF) can be viewed as high stakes gambling with more than one winning outcome and more than one outcome leading to failure. Knowing the odds of successful outcomes, the odds of outcomes leading to failure, and the various costs is a tremendous asset in any form of gambling. Four important variables have been reported to affect pregnancy rates in IVF programs: age of patient, number of unsuccessful prior attempts, embryo morphology, and number of embryos transferred.

While it is desirable to optimize pregnancy rates, such optimization may often result in a high incidence of multiple gestation. Data …

Burnett Description For Plane Poiseuille Flow, Alejandro Garcia, F. Uribe

Faculty Publications

Two recent works have shown that at small Knudsen number ~K! the pressure and temperature profiles in plane Poiseuille flow exhibit a different qualitative behavior from the profiles obtained by the Navier-Stokes equations. Tij and Santos [J. Stat. Phys. 76, 1399 (1994)] used the Bhatnagar-Gross-Kook model to show that the temperature profile is bimodal and the pressure profile is nonconstant. Malek-Mansour, Baras, and Garcia [Physica A 240, 255 (1997)] qualitatively confirmed these predictions in computer experiments using the direct simulation Monte Carlo method (DSMC). In this paper we compare the DSMC measurements of hydrodynamic variables and non-equilibrium fluxes with numerical …

Constraints On H0 From The Central Velocity Dispersions Of Lens Galaxies, Aaron J. Romanowsky, C. S. Kochanek

Faculty Publications

We employ Schwarzschild's method of the orbit modeling to constrain the mass profiles of the central lens galaxies in Q0957+561 and PG 1115+080. We combine the measured, central projected stellar velocity dispersions of these galaxies with the self-similar radial profiles of the rms velocity and of the Gauss-Hermite moment h4 observed in nearby galaxies for 0 lesssim R lesssim 2Reff. For Q0957+561, we find a 16% uncertainty in the galaxy mass and formal 2 σ limits on the Hubble constant of H0=61$\mathstrut{^{+13}_{-15}}$ km s-1 Mpc-1. For PG 1115+080, we find that none of the viable lens models can be ruled …

Recurrence And Ergodicity Of Interacting Particle Systems, J. Theodore Cox, Achim Klenke

Mathematics - All Scholarship

Many interacting particle systems with short range interactions are not ergodic, but converge weakly towards a mixture of their ergodic invariant measures. The question arises whether a.s. the process eventually stays close to one of these ergodic states, or if it changes between the attainable ergodic states infinitely often ("recurrence"). Under the assumption that there exists a convergence--determining class of distributions that is (strongly) preserved under the dynamics, we show that the system is in fact recurrent in the above sense. We apply our method to several interacting particle systems, obtaining new or improved recurrence results. In addition, we answer …

Java’S Insecure Parallelism, Per Brinch Hansen

College of Engineering and Computer Science - Former Departments, Centers, Institutes and Projects

The author examines the synchronization features of Java and finds that they are insecure variants of his earliest ideas in parallel programming published in 1972-73. The claim that Java supports monitors is shown to be false. The author concludes that Java ignores the last twenty-five years of research in parallel programming languages.

Fisher Information In Weighted Distributions, Satish Iyengar, Paul H. Kvam, Harshinder Singh

Department of Math & Statistics Faculty Publications

Standard inference procedures assume a random sample from a population with density f_μ(x) for estimating the parameter μ. However, there are many applications in which the available data are a biased sample instead. Fisher modeled biased sampling using a weight function w(x) ¸ 0, and constructed a weighted distribution with a density f_μ^w(x) that is proportional to w(x)f_μ(x). In this paper, we assume that f_μ(x) belongs to an exponential family, and study the Fisher information about μ in observations obtained from some commonly arising weighted distributions: (i) the k^th order …

Webhla - An Interactive Multiplayer Environment For High Performance Distributed Modeling And Simulation, Geoffrey C. Fox, Wojtek Furmanski, Subhash Nair, Hasan T. Ozdemir, Zeynep Odcikin-Ozdemir, Tom A. Pulikal

Northeast Parallel Architecture Center

The process of integrating DoD Modeling and Simulation paradigms around the new HLA/RTI standards proceeds in parallel with the onset of new Object Web standards for distributed objects and componentware, emergent at the crossroads of CORBA, DCOM, Java, and XML based distributed object technologies. We describe here our WebHLA approach which integrates both trends by offering Object Web based implementation of the HLA framework. WebHLA follows a three-tier architecture including: a) Web / Commodity based interactive simulation authoring and runtime front-ends given by Java applets or DirectX multiplayers; b) software bus in the middleware, given by Object Web RTI i.e. …

Grazing Arizona: Public Land Management In The Southwest, Char Miller

Pomona Faculty Publications and Research

In February of 1999, the chief of the U.S. Forest Service, Michael Dombeck, placed a moratorium on road building on most roadless areas. In October, President Clinton put forth an initiative to prohibit road building on 40 million acres of roadless area. Such modifications in Forest Service land management decisions is not new as suggested by Char Miller in this look back at early grazing decisions by Pinchot. To be proactive and reactive at the same time in relation to changing social pressures and political realties may be the legacy of the agency.

Benchmarks And Standards For The Evaluation Of Parallel Job Schedulers, Steve J. Chapin, Walfredo Cirne, Dror G. Feitelson, James Patton Jones

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science - All Scholarship

The evaluation of parallel job schedulers hinges on the workloads used. It is suggested that this be standardized, in terms of both format and content, so as to ease the evaluation and comparison of different systems. The question remains whether this can encompass both traditional parallel systems and metacomputing systems. This paper is based on a panel on this subject that was held at the workshop, and the ensuing discussion; its authors are both the panel members and participants from the audience. Naturally, not all of us agree with all the opinions expressed here...

Performance Analysis Of Csma And Btma Protocols In Multihop Networks: Part Ii - Multiple Channel Case, Lin Wu, Pramod K. Varshney

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science - All Scholarship

Busy tone multiple access protocols have been used in multihop networks to reduce the effect of the hidden terminal problem. This paper demonstrates another approach to reduce the effect of the hidden terminal problem namely the use of multiple channel schemes. A protocol that uses both the busy tone and the multiple channel techniques achieves the best performance. Using a Markov chain model and an approximation, the throughput performance of the multiple channel nonpersistent CSMA protocol and the multiple channel conservative BTMA protocol in a large network is evaluated and compared. The results show that the multichannel CSMA and BTMA …

A Matrix-Based Approach To Global Locality Optimization, Mahmut Kandemir, Alok Choudhary, J. Ramanujam, Prith Banerjee

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science - All Scholarship

Global locality optimization is a technique for improving the cache performance of a sequence of loop nests through a combination of loop and data layout transformations. Pure loop transformations are restricted by data dependences and may not be very successful in optimizing imperfectly nested loops and explicitly parallelized programs. Although pure data transformations are not constrained by data dependences, the impact of a data transformation on an array might be program-wide; that is, it can affect all the references to that array in all the loop nests. Therefore, in this paper we argue for an integrated approach that employs both …

Truce: Agent Coordination Through Concurrent Interpretation Of Role-Based Protocols, Wilfred C. Jamison, Douglas Lea

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science - All Scholarship

Established protocols for coordination are essential for implementing joint-action activities among collaborating software agent. Most existing agents, however, are designed only to support static protocols, which limit their interaction domain to specific sets of agents. We develop an agent collaboration framework for open systems that enables an agent to expand its acquaintance set and to adapt to various coordination protocols dynamically. This is achieved through writing coordination scripts that are interpreted at collaboration time. We developed a role-based coordination language for writing these scripts, where the coordination mechanism used is the concurrent interpretation of a single script by the participants …

Formal Development Of Secure Email, Dan Zhou, Joncheng C. Kuo, Susan Older, Shiu-Kai Chin

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science - All Scholarship

Developing systems that are assured to be secure requires precise and accurate descriptions of specifications, designs, implementations, and security properties. Formal specification and verification have long been recognized as giving the highest degree of assurance. In this paper, we describe a software development process that integrates formal verification and synthesis. We demonstrate this process by developing assured sender and receiver C++ code for a secure electronic mail system, Privacy Enhanced Mail. We use higher-order logic for system-requirements specification, design specifications and design verification. We use a combination of higher-order logic and category theory and tools supporting these formalisms to refine …

Continuous Models Of Computation For Logic Programs: Importing Continuous Mathematics Into Logic Programming's Algorithmic Foundations, Howard A. Blair, Fred Dushin, David W. Jakel, Angel J. Rivera, Metin Sezgin

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science - All Scholarship

Logic programs may be construed as discrete-time and continuous-time dynamical systems with continuous states. Techniques for obtaining explicit formulations of such dynamical systems are presented and the computational performance of examples is presented. Extending 2-valued and n-valued logic to continuousvalued logic is shown to be unique, up to choosing the representations of the individual truth values as elements of a continuous field, provided that lowest degree polynomials are selected. In the case of 2-valued logic, the constraint that enables the uniqueness of the continualization is that the Jacobian matrices of the continualizations of the Boolean connectives have only affine entries. …

Formal Analysis Of A Secure Communication Channel: Secure Core-Email Protocol, Dan Zhou, Shiu-Kai Chin

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science - All Scholarship

To construct a highly-assured implementation of secure communication channels we must have clear definitions of the security services, the channels, and under what assumptions these channels provide the desired services. We formally define secure channel services and develop a detailed example. The example is a core protocol common to a family of secure email systems. We identify the necessary properties of cryptographic algorithms to ensure that the email protocol is secure, and we verify that the email protocol provides secure services under these assumptions. We carry out the definitions and verifications in higher-order logic using the HOL theorem-prover. All our …

A Hierarchical Analysis Approach For High Performance Computing And Communication Applications, Salim Hariri, Pramod Varshney, Luying Zhou, Vinod V. Menon, Shihab Ghaya

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science - All Scholarship

The proliferation of high performance computers and high-speed networks has made parallel and distributed computing feasible and cost-effective on High Performance Computing and Communication Systems (HPCC). However, the design, analysis and development of parallel and distributed applications on such computing systems are still very challenging tasks. Therefore, there is a great need for an integrated multilevel analysis methodology to assist in designing and analyzing the performance of both existing and proposed systems. Currently, there are no comprehensive analysis methods that address such diverse needs. This paper presents a three-level hierarchical modeling approach for analyzing the end-to-end performance of an application …

Multivalued Mappings, Fixed-Point Theorems And Disjunctive Databases, Pascal Hitzler, Anthony K. Seda

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

In this paper, we discuss the semantics of disjunctive programs and databases and show how multivalued mappings and their fixed points arise naturally within this context. A number of fixed-point theorems for multivalued mappings are considered, some of which are already known and some of which are new. The notion of a normal derivative of a disjunctive program is introduced. Normal derivatives are normal logic programs which are determined by the disjunctive program. Thus, the well-known single-step operator associated with a normal derivative is single-valued, and its fixed points can be found by well-established means. It is shown how fixed …

On The Decomposition Of Order-Separable Posets Of Countable Width Into Chains, Gary Gruenhage, Joe Mashburn

Mathematics Faculty Publications

partially ordered set X has countable width if and only if every collection of pairwise incomparable elements of X is countable. It is order-separable if and only if there is a countable subset D of X such that whenever p, q ∈ X and p < q, there is r ∈ D such that p ≤ r ≤ q. Can every order-separable poset of countable width be written as the union of a countable number of chains? We show that the answer to this question is "no" if there is a 2-entangled subset of IR, and "yes" under the Open Coloring Axiom.

Available Resources Of The Fire Clay Coal In Part Of The Eastern Kentucky Coal Field, Stephen F. Greb, Gerald A. Weisenfluh, Robert E. Andrews, John K. Hiett, James C. Cobb, Richard E. Sergeant

Report of Investigations--KGS

Available resources for the Fire Clay coal were calculated for a 15-quadrangle area in the Eastern Kentucky Coal Field. Original coal resources were estimated to be 1.8 billion tons (BT). Coal mined or lost in mining was estimated at 449 million tons (MT), leaving 1.3 BT of remaining Fire Clay resources in the study area. Of the remaining resources, 400 MT is restricted from mining, primarily because the coal is less than 28 in. thick, normally considered too thin to mine underground using present technology. The total coal available for mining in the study area is 911 MT, or 52 …

Geology Of The Fire Clay Coal In Part Of The Eastern Kentucky Coal Field, Stephen F. Greb, John K. Hiett, Gerald A. Weisenfluh, Robert E. Andrews, Richard E. Sergeant

Report of Investigations--KGS

Coal beds mined in Kentucky often are not laterally continuous in thickness, quality, or roof condition. Regional and local variation is common. Because thickness, quality, and roof conditions are the result of geologic processes that were active when the coal was deposited as a peat swamp, a better understanding of the relationships between geology and major coal resources can aid in identifying geologic trends, which can be extrapolated beyond areas of present mining. The focus of this study is on the Fire Clay (Hazard No. 4) coal, one of the leading producers in the Eastern Kentucky Coal Field with 20 …

Compositional Variations In The Fire Clay Coal Bed Of Eastern Kentucky: Geochemistry, Petrography, Palynology, And Paleoecology, Cortland F. Eble, James C. Hower, William Morton Andrews Jr.

Report of Investigations--KGS

Bench samples of the Fire Clay coal bed, collected from 28 localities in a study area of eight 7.5-minute quadrangles in the Eastern Kentucky Coal Field, were analyzed geochemically, petrographically, and palynologically to determine any spatial or temporal trends among the studied parameters.

At most sample sites the Fire Clay is split by a flint-clay parting of probable volcanic origin. The upper bench of the Fire Clay coal generally is thick, laterally continuous, low in ash yield and sulfur content, has a moderate to high calorific value, and is high in total vitrinite content. In contrast, the lower bench generally …

Tectonic Implications Of Erosional And Depositional Features In Upper Meramecian And Lower Chesterian (Mississippian) Rocks Of South-Central And East-Central Kentucky, Garland R. Dever Jr.

Bulletin--KGS

Erosional and depositional features in upper Meramecian and lower Chesterian (Mississippian) carbonate rocks of south-central and east-central Kentucky suggest the influence of coeval structural activity. The study area, which extends from Pulaski County northeastward into Powell County, is underlain by (1) the Greenwood Anomaly, a large north-trending gravity anomaly, which probably represents part of a Precambrian rift system, and (2) the western part of the Rome Trough, an east-trending graben-like structure, which represents a Late Precambrian to Cambrian continental rift zone. The study focused on the St. Louis Limestone and lower Monteagle Limestone of south-central Kentucky and correlative carbonate rocks …

Santa Clara Magazine, Volume 41 Number 3, Winter 1999, Santa Clara University

Santa Clara Magazine

8 - NOT WITH MY DAUGHTER, YOU DON'T! By Susan Fry. An SCU psychologist explores the correlation between dating and self-esteem for adolescent girls.

12 - COMMON GROUND FOUND By Tamara Straus. SCU has a new partner: the Smithsonian Center for Mate rials Research and Education. Together they are pursuing what a top-notch 21st-century education will require.

16 - THE NEW VOICES OF SANTA CLARA By Nichole Pichel, Miguel Legarreta, Charlene Abalos, Audrey Bilczo, and Jennifer Farris. Five incoming students share their experience of building values in a world of uneven prosperity, opportunity, and choice.

Editorial Board & Iowa Academy Of Science Officers And Directors

Journal of the Iowa Academy of Science: JIAS

No abstract provided.

Editorial Board & Iowa Academy Of Science Officers And Directors

Journal of the Iowa Academy of Science: JIAS

No abstract provided.

Osmia Spp. Reared In Artificial Nesting Sites In A Backyard Environment, R. L. Wilson, C. A. Abel, S. G. Mcclurg

Journal of the Iowa Academy of Science: JIAS

Controlled pollination in field cages is used at the United States Department of Agriculture - Agricultural Research Service North Central Regional Plane Introduction Station (NCRPIS) for seed increase of several plane species. Honey bees, Apis mellifera L., have been used almost exclusively for several years. Recently we began investigating other pollinating insects for controlled pollination. 0smia cornifrons (Radoszkowski), a solitary bee imported from Japan, has been an excellent early-season pollinator. We placed domiciles of these bees in backyards of the NCRPIS staff to aid us in providing adequate numbers of bees for use in field cages the following growing season. …

Distribution And Persistence Of Phyllachora Species On Poaceae In Iowa, A. C. Gabel, L. H. Tiffany

Journal of the Iowa Academy of Science: JIAS

Phytlachora spp. on Poaceae were collected to determine species present, grass hosts and distribution in Iowa. From 1959-1996 the fungus was collected 240 times from 67 different sites in 35 counties. Seven species of Phytlachora were collected on 25 species from 13 genera of grasses. P. graminis was collected 89 times from 43 sites on four species of Agropyron, two species of Calamagrostis, three species of Elymus, Hystrix patula, Panicum virgatum, and Setaria glauca. Seventy-two specimens of P. luteo-maculata on Andropogon gerardii or Schiziichyrium scoparium were collected from 30 sites. The study included 20 collections of P. cynodontis on Bouteloua …

Editorial Board & Iowa Academy Of Science Officers And Directors

Journal of the Iowa Academy of Science: JIAS

No abstract provided.

Monitoring The Effects Of Indoor Pollution Using Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy, Rachel Farrell

Presidential Scholars Theses (1990 – 2006)

Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy {FTIR) was used to develop an effective way to monitor indoor pollution and to observe the effects of such indoor pollution under various conditions of the ventilation system of McCollum Science Hall of the University of Northern Iowa, Cedar Falls, Iowa. This was done by monitoring the absorbance of acetone as it evaporated over time, and the data were used to create concentration vs. time plots. Several parameters from these plots were used to judge the ventilation system, with some general conclusions including that having the system on reduces peak time and end time. Also, the …

Distributed Artificial Intelligence In A Virtual Reality Setting: A Case Study, Rebecca Lohr

Presidential Scholars Theses (1990 – 2006)

Artificial intelligence, or Al, is a fascinating area of research. Al refers to the attempt to create a computer program, known as an intelligent agent, which can "think" and operate in a complex, changing environment. Many problems have been discovered in attempting to develop these intelligent agents, including the simulation of learning, planning, and natural language understanding. While researching these issues, a new branch of Al research has developed. Researchers discovered that there are other problems associated with how intelligent agents work together to solve problems. This field of research has become known as distributed artificial intelligence, or DAI.