Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Enrichment Over Iterated Monoidal Categories, Stefan Forcey

Mathematical Sciences Faculty Research

Joyal and Street note in their paper on braided monoidal categories [Braided tensor categories, Advances in Math. 102(1993) 20-78] that the 2-category V-Cat of categories enriched over a braided monoidal category V is not itself braided in any way that is based upon the braiding of V. The exception that they mention is the case in which V is symmetric, which leads to V-Cat being symmetric as well. The symmetry in V-Cat is based upon the symmetry of V. The motivation behind this paper is in part to describe how these facts relating V and V-Cat are in turn related …

Water Resources Year In Review - Winter 2004, Vol. 17, No. 2, Annis Water Resource Institute

AWRI Reviews

No abstract provided.

Land For Maine's Future Program: Increasing The Return On A Sound Public Investment, Richard Barringer, Hugh Coxe, Jack Kartez, Catherine Reilly, Jonathan Rubin

Economics and Finance

Maine is nowhere a more special place than in the quality of its landscape and the traditions of its land use. Among the mo st privately-owned of all the states, Maine’s natural diversity and beauty combine with its traditions of resource stewardship, open access, and appreciation of nature to distinguish it in the public mind and national imagination. In recent decades, however, these traditions have come under assault from the forces of economic and social change; and the people of Maine have responded. In 1986, Governor Joseph Brennan’s Special Commission on Outdoor Recreation recognized the growing threats to Maine’s natur …

Vemap Phase 2 Bioclimatic Database. I. Gridded Historical (20th Century) Climate For Modeling Ecosystem Dynamics Across The Conterminous Usa, T. G. F. Kittel, N. A. Rosenbloom, J. A. Royle, C. Daly, W. P. Gibson, H. H. Fisher, P. Thornton, D. N. Yates, C. Kaufman, R. Mckeown, D. Bachelet, D. S. Schimel, Steven W. Running, Vemap2 Participants

Ecosystem and Conservation Sciences Faculty Publications

Analysis and simulation of biospheric responses to historical forcing require surface climate data that capture those aspects of climate that control ecological processes, including key spatial gradients and modes of temporal variability. We developed a multivariate, gridded historical climate dataset for the conterminous USA as a common input database for the Vegetation/Ecosystem Modeling and Analysis Project (VEMAP), a biogeochemical and dynamic vegetation model intercomparison. The dataset covers the period 1895-1993 on a 0.5° latitude/longitude grid. Climate is represented at both monthly and daily timesteps. Variables are: precipitation, mininimum and maximum temperature, total incident solar radiation, daylight-period irradiance, vapor pressure, and …

Electricity Deregulation And The Valuation Of Visibility Loss In Wilderness Areas: A Research Note., John M. Halstead, Thomas H. Stevens, Wendy Harper, L Bruce Hill

Natural Resources & the Environment

Visibility in most wilderness areas in the northeastern United States has declined substantially since the 1970s. As noted by Hill et al. (2000), despite the 1977 Clean Air Act and subsequent amendments, human induced smog conditions are becoming increasingly worse. Average visibility in class I airsheds, such as the Great Gulf Wilderness in New Hampshire’s White Mountains, is now about one-third of natural conditions. A particular concern is that deregulation of electricity production could result in further degradation because consumers may switch to lower cost fossil fuel generation (Harper 2000). To the extent that this system reduces electricity costs, it …

The Guy Harvey Research Institute Using Science To Conserve Our Ocean's Fishes, Nova Southeastern University

Halmos College of Natural Sciences and Oceanography Course Catalogs

No abstract provided.

A Use-Case Model For A Knowledge Management System To Facilitate Disaster Relief Operations, Eileen Eudy

CCE Theses and Dissertations

There are numerous disaster relief agencies poised to respond to disasters; however, coordinating the activities of these diverse and dispersed entities and capitalizing on their knowledge assets can be a challenge. All of these agencies are dedicated to serving survivors of disasters, but they at times lack the coordination necessary to respond efficiently. The Virginia Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster (VOAD) is an umbrella organization of existing agencies dedicated to working closely with other organizations to improve service and minimize duplication during disaster operations. To better cope with disasters, the Virginia VOAD needs to develop knowledge management strategies to coordinate …

The Impact Of Distance Learning On Faculty Contracts And Policies In Florida Community Colleges, M. Kate Legrand

CCE Theses and Dissertations

Distance Learning is state of the art and is fast becoming a primary instructional delivery method in Florida community colleges. However, the present laws and policies that govern Florida's community college educational system are created based on traditional methods for delivering educational services. The potential change in faculty roles and responsibilities brought about by distance learning has raised questions about the impact distance learning will have on overall labor conditions for American faculty. In some instances, the use of alternative methods of delivering educational services has resulted in inconsistent policies. As more faculty become involved in teaching online courses, there …

A Framework For The Identification Of Electronic Commerce Visual Design Elements That Enable Trust Within The Small Hotel Industry, R. Todd Stephens

CCE Theses and Dissertations

Trust plays an important role in any customer relationship or transaction. This is especially true in the world of commerce. Buyers and sellers must make the conscious decision whether or not to trust the other party. Trust is an integral part of commerce and has been in existence since the beginning of human social interactions. With the emerging use of the Internet as a business medium of exchange, trust maintains an important role in electronic commerce. This research reviews the role of trust within the small hotel industry and the design elements having the highest impact toward developing trust between …

Single-Sided Czt Strip Detectors, John R. Macri, L A. Hamel, Manuel Julien, R S. Miller, B Donmez, Mark L. Mcconnell, James M. Ryan, Mark Widholm

Space Science Center

We report progress in the study of thick CZT strip detectors for 3-D imaging and spectroscopy and discuss two approaches to device design. Unlike double-sided strip detectors, these devices feature both row and column contacts implemented on the anode surface. This electron-only approach circumvents problems associated with poor hole transport in CZT that normally limit the thickness and energy range of double-sided strip detectors. The work includes laboratory and simulation studies aimed at developing compact, efficient, detector modules for 0.05 to 1 MeV gamma radiation measurements while minimizing the number and complexity of the electronic readout channels. These devices can …

The Nonlinear Coupling Of Electromagnetic Ion Cyclotron And Lower Hybrid Waves In The Ring Current Region: The Magnetic Storm 1–7 May 1998, G. V. Khazanov, E. N. Krivorutsky, K. V. Gamayunov, L. A. Avanov

Aerospace, Physics, and Space Science Faculty Publications

The excitation of lower hybrid waves (LHWs) is a widely discussed mechanism of interaction between plasma species in space, and is one of the unresolved questions of magnetospheric multi-ion plasmas. In this paper we present the morphology, dynamics, and level of LHWactivity generated by electromagnetic ion cyclotron (EMIC) waves during the 2–7 May 1998 storm period on the global scale. The LHWs were calculated based on a newly developed selfconsistent model (Khazanov et. al., 2002) that couples the system of two kinetic equations: one equation describes the ring current (RC) ion dynamic, and another equation describes the evolution of EMIC …

A Furi-Pera Theorem In Hausdorff Topological Spaces For Acyclic Maps, Ravi P. Agarwal, Donal O'Regan, Jewgeni H. Dshalalow

Mathematics and System Engineering Faculty Publications

We present new Furi-Pera theorems for acyclic maps between topological spaces.

Flexible Spatial Models For Kriging And Cokriging Using Moving Averages And The Fast Fourier Transform (Fft), Jay M. Ver Hoef, Noel A. Cressie, Ronald P. Barry

Faculty of Informatics - Papers (Archive)

Models for spatial autocorrelation and cross-correlation depend on the distance and direction separating two locations, and are constrained so that for all possible sets of locations, the covariance matrices implied from the models remain nonnegative-definite. Based on spatial correlation, optimal linear predictors can be constructed that yield complete maps of spatial fields from incomplete and noisy spatial data. This methodology is called kriging if the data are of only one variable type, and it is called cokriging if it is of two or more variable types. Historically, to satisfy the nonnegative-definite condition, cokriging has used coregionalization models for cross-variograms, even …

Designing Applications For Mobile Phones: The Mobile Subject Assistant, Sam Jebeile

Faculty of Informatics - Papers (Archive)

The rapid adoption rate of mobile phones coupled with advancements in supporting technologies suggests mobile phones may now be a viable tool for classroom use. In this paper we introduce the Mobile Subject Assistant, a proposed mobile phone based course tool. The tool is intended to assist in the delivery of university level subjects with an emphasis on student participation, collaboration and group or project work. We discuss a number of issues related to the design of interfaces for mobile phone applications and briefly describe the design of the interface to the Mobile Subject Assistant.

Mirroring Does Not Equal Transparency: The Importance Of Culturally Aware Student Interfaces, Penelope Mcfarlane, A. Fuller

Faculty of Informatics - Papers (Archive)

The University of Wollongong, along with most other Australian universities, now has considerable investment in delivering courses to Asian markets. While there is some concern regarding the relevance of a Western-based subject delivery to an Asian culture, most transnational teachers do localize course materials to varying degrees. However, the web-based interfaces to the subject materials are rarely, if ever, similarly adapted to better suit the culture of the intended target audience.

In this paper we argue that failure to take into consideration student perceptions of the interface provided to the materials may adversely affect the usability of such systems. Any …

A Longitudinal Study Of The Use Of The Web By Regional Tourism Organisations In The Asia Pacific Region, Lois Burgess, Joan Cooper, Carole Alcock, Preeti Uppala

Faculty of Informatics - Papers (Archive)

The information-intensive nature of the tourism and travel industry suggests an important role for Web technology in the promotion and marketing of tourist destinations. With reports of travel purchases and reservations being one of the fastest growing segments of the Internet community (eMarketer, 2002), it is no surprise that the number of tourism operators on the Web has increased considerably over the past few years. This paper presents the results of a longitudinal study of the use of Web technologies by Regional Tourism Organisations (RTOs) in the Asia-Pacific tourism industry. The Websites of 195 RTOs in the Asia-Pacific Region were …

A Research Framework For The Adoption And Usage Of Executive Information Systems By Organisational Executives: An Exploratory Study, Emmanuel Matthew Ikart, George Ditsa

Faculty of Informatics - Papers (Archive)

To improve the performance of executives’ work, a number of organisations have implemented executive information systems (EIS). Although the use of EIS is important in executives’ work, majority of executives are unwilling to use EIS applications. By using social factors, habits and facilitation conditions variables from Triandis’ framework, this paper extends TAM to derive variables to address the problem of the low usage of EIS by executives. This paper reports on research in progress in Australia on the adoption and usage of EIS by executives. The preliminary results suggest that executives’ experience in EIS positively relates to their experience in …

Issues Affecting Power Engineering Undergraduate Education In Australia, D A. Robinson, Victor J. Gosbell

Faculty of Informatics - Papers (Archive)

Recent changes to the electric power industry through deregulation and restructuring have had a considerable effect on power engineering education internationally. A number of Australian universities have also noticed a decline in the number of students interested in power engineering subjects, leading to the fewer graduates with power engineering knowledge. With a reduction in graduates and a perception of an aging workforce a shortage of suitably qualified power engineers for industry may be imminent. This paper provides discussion on the current status of university power engineering education within Australia and includes results from a recent Australia-wide survey of the university …

Power Quality Data Analysis Using Unsupervised Data Mining, Ali Asheibi, David A. Stirling, Sarath Perera, D A. Robinson

Faculty of Informatics - Papers (Archive)

The rapid increase in the size of databases required to store power quality monitoring data has demanded new techniques for analysing and understanding the data. One suggested technique to assist in analysis is data mining. Data mining is a process that uses a variety of data analysis tools to identify hidden patterns and relationships within large samples of data. This paper presents several data mining tools and techniques that are applicable to power quality data analysis to enable efficient reporting of disturbance indices and identify network problems through pattern recognition. This paper also presents results of data mining techniques applied …

Flicker Transfer In Radial Power Systems, Sankika Tennakoon, Lakshal Perera, D A. Robinson, Sarath Perera

Faculty of Informatics - Papers (Archive)

Loads which exhibit continuous and rapid variations in their current can cause voltage fluctuations that are often referred to as flicker. One good example for such loads is arc furnaces which are usually fed by dedicated feeders from the high voltage busbars in transmission systems. The flicker generated from such loads will propagate to the upstream HV point of common coupling (PCC), and from there to the downstream through the transmission and sub transmission systems. This paper demonstrates how the generated flicker is propagated from the HV PCC to the downstream in radial networks exhibiting different levels of attenuation depending …

Assessing The Future Of Electrical Power Engineering: A Report On Electrical Power Engineering Manpower Requirements In Australia, Victor J. Gosbell, D A. Robinson

Faculty of Informatics - Papers (Archive)

In 2001 the Electric Energy Society of Australia (EESA) developed concerns based on anecdotal evidence that there was a looming shortage of electrical power engineers in Australia. Information from the electrical power industry and academic communities was obtained through two separate survey questionnaires, a discussion workshop, and a number of submissions. This information was collated and compiled into 'Assessing the Future of Electrical Power Engineering: a Report on Electrical Power Engineering Manpower Requirements in Australia'.

Dynamic Multimedia Adaptation And Updating Of Media Streams With Mpeg-21, L. Rong, I. Burnett

Faculty of Informatics - Papers (Archive)

The paper discusses media streaming using dynamic resource adaptation and update as a means of facilitating universal multimedia access (UMA): the concept of accessing multimedia content through a variety of possible schemes (Bormans, J. et al., IEEE Sig. Process. Magazine, 2003). As background, the paper summarizes the most common content negotiation approaches and addresses their facets and problems. MPEG-21, the multimedia framework and its relationship to UMA are then explained. Our primary focus is an end-to-end approach to content adaptation which takes advantage of MPEG-21 to facilitate the UMA concept in a media streaming environment. The concept is validated using …

Hierarchic Decomposition In Agent Oriented Conceptual Modelling, R. B. Brown, Aditya K. Ghose

Faculty of Informatics - Papers (Archive)

Software development processes requires a thorough understanding of stakeholder objectives and requirements. Product-centrism is an insufficient stance from which to achieve greater efficiencies and reduce reengineering. Stakeholder requirement elicitation is thus worthy of formalization. A suite of tools, notably the i* model, provides a framework for early-phase requirements capture. These tools currently are at best only semiautomated and essentially consist of a notational glossary and sets of mark-up symbols. Increasing formalization may lead to greater automation of the process in the future, but currently there is a degree of flexibility that presents pitfalls for the unwary practitioner. A notion of …

Co-Evolution Of Complementary Formal And Informal Requirements, Aneesh Krishna, Aditya K. Ghose, S. A. Vilkomir

Faculty of Informatics - Papers (Archive)

Agent-oriented Conceptual Modelling (AoCM, as exemplified by the i* notation by E. Yu (1995)), represents an interesting approach to modelling early phase requirements that is particularly effective in capturing organizational contexts, stake-holder intentions and rationale. There are significant benefits in using formal methods for the development of computer systems and improving their quality. We propose a methodology which permits the use of these two otherwise disparate approaches in a complementary and synergistic fashion for requirements engineering.

Combining Agent-Oriented Conceptual Modelling With Formal Methods, S. A. Vilkomir, Aditya K. Ghose, A. Krishna

Faculty of Informatics - Papers (Archive)

Agent-oriented conceptual modelling notations such as i* have received considerable recent attention as a useful approach to early-phase requirements engineering. Agent-oriented conceptual modelling notations are highly effective in representing requirements from an intentional stance and answering questions such as what goals exist, how key actors depend on each other and what alternatives must be considered. Formal methods such as those based on the Z notation offer a complementary set of representational facilities. We explore how these two otherwise disparate approaches might be used in a synergistic fashion.

Two Complex Orthogonal Space-Time Codes For Eight Transmit Antennas, Le Chung Tran, Jennifer Seberry, Yejing Wang, Beata J. Wysocki, Tadeusz A. Wysocki, Tianbing Xia, Ying Zhao

Faculty of Informatics - Papers (Archive)

Two new constructions of complex orthogonal space-time block codes of order 8 based on the theory of amicable orthogonal designs are presented and their performance compared with that of the standard code of order 8. These new codes are suitable for multi-modulation schemes where the performance can be sacrificed for a higher throughput.

Performance Evaluation Of A Proxy System For Providing Immersive Audio Communication To Massively Multi-Player Games, C. D. Nguyen, Farzad Safaei, P. Boustead

Faculty of Informatics - Papers (Archive)

In this paper, a distributed proxy architecture is introduced for the provisioning of an immersive audio communication service to massively multi-player online games. The immersive audio communication service enables each avatar to hear a realistic audio mix of conversations in its hearing range. In our earlier work, peer-to-peer and central server architectures have been proposed for this service. In this paper, a distributed proxy architecture with either using network multicast or unicast between proxies is introduced to address the limitations of the previous architectures. The main focus of this paper is to evaluate the bandwidth cost saving of network multicast …

Visual Perceptual Process Model And Object Segmentation, Wanqing Li, P. Ogunbona, Lei Ye, Igor Kharitonenko

Faculty of Informatics - Papers (Archive)

Modeling human visual process is crucial for automatic object segmentation that is able to produce consistent results to human perception. Based on the latest understanding of how human performs the task of extracting objects from images, we proposed a graph-based computational framework to model the visual process. The model supports the hierarchical nature of human visual perception and consists of the key steps of human visual perception including pre-attentive (pre-constancy) grouping, figure-and-ground organization, and attentive (post-constancy) grouping. A divide-and-conquer implementation of the model based on the concept of shortest spanning tree (SST) has demonstrated the potential of the model for …

A Recursive Overlay Multicast Algorithm For Distribution Of Audio Streams In Networked Games, M. Dowlatshahi, Farzad Safaei

Faculty of Informatics - Papers (Archive)

This paper aims to provide a fast multicast algorithm among a set of distributed proxies to enable the creation of realistic audio for networked games. We assume that each proxy is responsible for a group of clients. The proxy receives the audio packets from its clients and multicasts this audio to every other proxy that requires this audio for any of its attached clients. In crowded virtual environments, the number of multicast trees could be quite large and these undergoes continuous change as the avatars move in and out of each others hearing range. To reduce the effect of overhead …

Investigation And Modeling Of Traffic Issues In Immersive Audio Environments, J. Mcmahon, M. Rumsewicz, P. Boustead, Farzad Safaei

Faculty of Informatics - Papers (Archive)

A growing area of technical importance is that of distributed virtual environments for work and play. For the audio component of such environments to be useful, great emphasis must be placed on the delivery of high quality audio scenes in which participants may change their relative positions. In this paper we describe and analyze an algorithm focused on maintaining relative synchronization between multiple users of such an environment and examine the subjective quality of service achieved.