Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Twelfth Wildlife Damage Management Conference

Wildlife Damage Management Conference Proceedings

The Twelfth Wildlife Damage Management Conference will be held Monday through Thursday, April 9-12, 2007, in the Omni Corpus Christi Hotel, in Corpus Christi, Texas. The Conference features 2 days of selected speakers covering aspects of wildlife damage management and control, plus 5 optional field trips on April 12th.

Climatic And Structural Controls On The Geomorphology Of Wadi Sana, Highland Southern Yemen, Joshua Michael Anderson

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Middle Holocene climate change forced significant environmental response and influenced human activities throughout southern Arabia. Climate models and proxy data indicate that climate along the southern Arabian peninsula changed from a moist phase, spanning the early to middle Holocene, to an arid phase, which persisted for the last ca. 5,000 years. A weakening and southward shift of the Southwest Indian Monsoon System, forced by northern hemisphere insolation variations in the precession band and/or glacial boundary conditions, is suggested as the mechanism for the abrupt shift to more arid conditions. Geoarchaeological evidence suggests that agriculture was more widespread and evolved alongside …

Covariate Adjustment In Randomized Trials With Binary Outcomes: Targeted Maximum Likelihood Estimation, Kelly L. Moore, Mark J. Van Der Laan

U.C. Berkeley Division of Biostatistics Working Paper Series

Covariate adjustment using linear models for continuous outcomes in randomized trials has been shown to increase efficiency and power over the unadjusted method in estimating the marginal effect of treatment. However, for binary outcomes, investigators generally rely on the unadjusted estimate as the literature indicates that covariate-adjusted estimates based on logistic regression models are less efficient. The crucial step that has been missing when adjusting for covariates is that one must integrate/average the adjusted estimate over those covariates in order to obtain the marginal effect. We apply the method of targeted maximum likelihood estimation (MLE), as presented in van der …

Lake Whatcom Monitoring Project 2005/2006 Report, Robin A. Matthews, Michael Hilles, Joan Vandersypen, Robert J. Mitchell, Geoffrey B. Matthews

Lake Whatcom Annual Reports

This report is part of an on-going series of annual reports and special project reports that document the Lake Whatcom monitoring program. This work is conducted by the Institute for Watershed Studies and other departments at Western Washington University.

The major objective of this program is to provide long-term baseline water quality monitoring in Lake Whatcom and selected tributaries. Each section contains brief explanations about the water quality data, along with discussions of patterns observed in Lake Whatcom.

Biophysical Characterization Of A Beta-Peptide Bundle: Comparison To Natural Proteins, E. James Petersson, Cody J. Craig, Douglas S. Daniels, Jade X. Qiu, Alanna S. Schepartz

Chemistry Faculty Publications

We recently described the high-resolution X-ray structure of a helical bundle composed of eight copies of the β-peptide Zwit-1F. Like many proteins in Nature, the Zwit-1F octamer contains parallel and antiparallel helices, extensive inter-helical electrostatic interactions, and a solvent-excluded hydrophobic core. Here we explore the stability of the Zwit-1F octamer using circular dichroism (CD) spectroscopy, analytical ultracentrifugation (AU), differential scanning calorimetry (DSC), and NMR. These studies demonstrate that the thermodynamic and kinetic properties of Zwit-1F closely resemble those of α-helical bundle proteins. Together these studies should provide a model for the design of β-peptide proteins with biological functions.

Dust And Pah Emission In The Star-Forming Active Nucleus Of Ngc 1097, R. E. Mason, N. A. Levenson, C. Packham, Moshe Elitzur, J. Radomski, A. O. Petric, G. S. Wright

Physics and Astronomy Faculty Publications

The nucleus of the nearby galaxy NGC 1097 is known to host a young, compact (r < 9 pc) nuclear star cluster, as well as a low-luminosity active galactic nucleus (AGN). It has been suggested both that the nuclear stellar cluster is associated with a dusty torus and that low-luminosity AGNs like NGC 1097 do not have the torus predicted by the unified model of AGNs. To investigate these contradictory possibilities we have acquired Gemini/T-ReCS 11.7 and 18.3 μm images of the central few hundred parsecs of this galaxy at <45 pc angular resolution, in which the nucleus and spectacular, kiloparsec-scale star-forming ring are detected in both bands. The small-scale mid-IR luminosity implies thermal emission from warm dust close to the central engine. Fitting of torus models shows that the observed mid-IR emission cannot be accounted for by dust heated by the central engine. Rather, the principal source heating the dust in this object is the nuclear star cluster itself, suggesting that the detected dust is not the torus of AGN unified schemes (although it is also possible that the dusty starburst itself could provide the obscuration invoked by the unified model). Comparison of Spitzer IRS and Gemini GNIRS spectra shows that, although PAH bands are strong in the immediate circumnuclear region of the galaxy, PAH emission is weak or absent in the central 19 pc. The lack of PAH emission can probably be explained largely by destruction/ionization of PAH molecules by hard photons from the nuclear star cluster. If NGC 1097 is typical, PAH emission bands may not be a useful tool with which …

The Spectroscopic And Astrometric Orbits Of Hr 672, Francis C. Fekel, Michael H. Williamson, Dimitri Pourbaix

Information Systems and Engineering Management Research Publications

From a very extensive set of radial velocities obtained at Fairborn Observatory we have computed a new spectroscopic orbit for HR 672. This binary has an orbital period of 93.290 days and an eccentricity of 0.5249. The greatly improved orbital elements have been incorporated into a new astrometric orbit, which has an inclination of 110°, from Hipparcos data. The primary is a slowly rotating early G star that is situated nearly 1 mag above the main sequence and is likely pseudosynchronously rotating. It has an iron abundance that is greater than that of the Sun. Lines of the secondary were …

The Design Of A Tethered Aerial Robot, Phillip J. Mckerrow, D. Ratner

Faculty of Informatics - Papers (Archive)

This paper describes the design and modeling of a robot that swings on the end of a tether. Its height above the ground is controlled by the length of the tether. Its location on a spherical shell at the end of the tether is controlled by a pair of ducted fans. The vertical orientation of its body is determined by the point at which the horizontal thrust force acts relative to the centre of gravity (cog). The system acts like a double pendulum with two modes of natural movement. It is modeled with coordinate frames at the ends of the …

What Is The Best Reference Rna? And Other Questions Regarding The Design And Analysis Of Two-Color Microarray Experiments, Kathleen F. Kerr, Kyle A. Serikawa, Caimiao Wei, Mette A. Peters, Roger E. Bumgarner

UW Biostatistics Working Paper Series

The reference design is a practical and popular choice for microarray studies using two-color platforms. In the reference design, the reference RNA uses half of all array resources, leading investigators to ask: What is the best reference RNA? We propose a novel method for evaluating reference RNAs and present the results of an experiment that was specially designed to evaluate three common choices of reference RNA. We found no compelling evidence in favor of any particular reference. In particular, a commercial reference showed no advantage in our data. Our experimental design also enabled a new way to test the effectiveness …

Warm Gas In The Inner Disks Around Young Intermediate-Mass Stars, Sean D. Brittain, Theodore Simon, Joan R. Najita, Terrence W. Rettig

Publications

The characterization of gas in the inner disks around young stars is of particular interest because of its connection to planet formation. In order to study the gas in inner disks, we have obtained high-resolution K- and M-band spectroscopy of 14 intermediate-mass young stars. In sources that have optically thick inner disks, i.e., E(K-L)>1, our detection rate of the rovibrational CO transitions is 100%, and the gas is thermally excited. Of the five sources that do not have optically thick inner disks, we only detect the rovibrational CO transitions from HD 141569. In this case, we show that the …

Evanescent Field Absorption Sensing Using Sapphire Fibers, Michael Grossman

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the application of coiled sapphire multimode optical fibers for evanescent wave chemical sensing in both the visible spectrum and the near infrared. As has been suggested in the literature pertaining to silica fibers, bending converts low-order modes to high order ones, which leads to more evanescent absorption and thus a more sensitive chemical detector. By coiling the fiber many times, it was expected that even greater sensitivity would be attained.

Experiments were performed to investigate the sensor response to different solutions and to characterize this response. In the first of three experiments, the large absorption peak of …

Development Of A Web Based Application For Tracking Human Resource Utilization For A Consulting Firm, Martin Kyne

Regis University Student Publications (comprehensive collection)

Velocity Systems LLC is a privately owned company located in Franktown, Colorado that specializes in the implementation of PeopleSoft ERP, CRM and data warehouse solutions. Velocity Systems' and its partners have been involved in this community for over a decade and have created a large network of relationships with both clients and other consultants who provide services similar to Velocity Systems. The implementation of a PeopleSoft packaged application requires a high degree of coordination of a lot of different skills. The resources provided by Velocity have worked in the industry as consultants for at least seven years and in that …

Wide-Bandwidth, Tunable, Multiple-Pulse-Width Optical Delays Using Slow Light In Cesium Vapor, Ryan M. Camacho, Michael V. Pack, John C. Howell, Aaron Schweinsberg, Robert W. Boyd

Mathematics, Physics, and Computer Science Faculty Articles and Research

We demonstrate an all-optical delay line in hot cesium vapor that tunably delays 275 ps input pulses up to 6.8 ns and 740 input ps pulses up to 59 ns (group index of approximately 200) with little pulse distortion. The delay is made tunable with a fast reconfiguration time (hundreds of ns) by optically pumping out of the atomic ground states.

Stable Algebras Of Entire Functions, Dan Coman, Evgeny A. Poletsky

Mathematics - All Scholarship

Suppose that h and g belong to the algebra B generated by the rational functions and an entire function f of finite order on Cⁿ and that h/g has algebraic polar variety. We show that either h/g in B or f = q₁e^p +q₂, where p is a polynomial and q¹, q² are rational functions. In the latter case, h/g belongs to the algebra generated by the rational functions, e^p and e^−p.

Influence Of Evapotranspiration On Patterns Of Ground-Water Conductivity In Small Basins, Ana Jiménez

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Ground-water conductivity data were obtained from shallow wells in a 12 km2 stream-basin along a 400 m transect, extending from the divide to the stream. The stream, Pringle Branch, is a second-order perennial stream in Hillsborough County, Florida. The shallow stratigraphy consists of 2-3 m of fine sand over a layer of clayey silt and silty clay. Vegetation cover includes grasses on the upper and middle slope, and riparian woodlands on the foot slope and floodplain. Precipitation is about 1.3 m per year. Shallow ground-water conductivity is about 50 uS/cm at the divide. It increases moderately along the mid slope, …

Selected Chemistry Of Biologically-Active Thiols : N-Acetylpenicillamine And 2-Mercaptobenzothiazole In Nitrosothiol Formation And Role In Allergic Contact Dermatitis Respectively, Itai Chipinda

Dissertations and Theses

Two biologically-active thiols, N-acetylpenicillamine (NAP) and 2-mercaptobenzothiazole (MBT), were studied in this thesis. NAP is known to combine with nitric oxide (NO) to produce S-nitroso-N-acetylpenicillamine (SNAP) and MBT is a known allergen.

The formation, reaction dynamics, and detailed kinetics and mechanism of the reaction between nitrous acid (HNO2), prepared in situ, and NAP to produce SNAP were studied. The reaction is first order in nitrite, NAP and acid in pH conditions at or slightly higher than the pKa of HNO2. Both HPLC and quadrupole time-of-flight mass spectrometry techniques confirmed the formation of SNAP and the absence of any other products. …

Take Pride In America In Southern Nevada: Quarterly Progress Report, Period Ending April 05, 2007, Margaret N. Rees

Anti-littering Programs

• Don’t Trash Nevada website traffic increased by 144% over the previous quarter.

• Project Manager Douglas Joslin made a presentation about the Take Pride in America in Southern Nevada program to the Executive Committee on February 7, 2007.

• 20 Don’t Trash Nevada advertisements ran during February and March.

• A billboard has been in place on US95 and Russell Road throughout this quarter.

• Don’t Trash Nevada purchased radio spots on Metro Networks in February and March.

• 137 people have taken the on-line anti-litter and dumping pledge.

• The anti-litter team received a $10,000 dollar donation from …

Interleukin-6 And Tumor Necrosis Factor-Alpha Values In Elk Neonates, Shannon M. Barber-Meyer, Craig R. Johnson, Michael P. Murtaugh, L. David Mech, P.J. White

United States Department of Agriculture Wildlife Services: Staff Publications

Serological indicators of general condition would be helpful for monitoring or assessing ungulate wildlife. Toward that end, we report the 1st reference values for 2 cytokines, interleukin-6 (IL-6) and tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-a), in neonatal elk (Cervus elaphus). We obtained blood samples from 140 calves ≤ 6 days old in Yellowstone National Park during summer 2003–2005. IL-6 values ranged from 0 to 1.21 pg/ml with a median of 0.03 pg/ml. TNF-a values ranged from 0 to 225.43 pg/ml with a median of 1.85 pg/ml. IL-6 and TNF-a concentrations were not significant predictors of elk calf survival through 21 …

Hikorocodium Endo Is Not An Alga But An Inozoid Sponge, J. Keith Rigby, Baba Senowbari-Daryan

Faculty Publications

The genus Hikorocodium, with the type species Hikorocodium elegantae from the Permian of Japan, was described originally as a codiacean alga by Endo. It is not a codiacean alga but an inozoid sponge of the family Preperonidellidae. Several fossils described later by Endo and other authors as H. elegantae should be assigned to different inozoid sponge taxa. Specimens of H. fertiliz, described by Endo from the Jurassic of Japan, are also sponge fragments. The taxonomic positions of H. transversum Endo and H. kuramotoi Nakamura, as sponges or

Alternative Large Nc Schemes And Chiral Dynamics, Joseph Schechter, Francesco Sannino

Physics - All Scholarship

We compare the dependences on the number of colors of the leading pion pion scattering amplitudes using the single index quark field and two index quark fields. These are seen to have different relationships to the scattering amplitudes suggested by chiral dynamics which can explain the long puzzling pion pion s wave scattering up to about 1 GeV. This may be interesting for getting a better understanding of the large Nc approach as well as for application to recently proposed technicolor models.

Conferencexp-Powered I-Minds: A Multiagent System For Intelligently Supporting Online Collaboration, Adam Eck, L.D. Miller, Leen-Kiat Soh, Hong Jiang, Tim Chou

CSE Technical Reports

In this paper, we describe a multiagent system designed for intelligently supporting online human collaboration, built on top of the ConferenceXP platform developed by Microsoft Research. Many current collaborative systems are passive in nature and do not provide active, intelligent support to users. A multiagent system can be used to track user behavior, perform automated tasks for humans, find optimal collaborative groups, and create and present helpful processed information based on data mining without detracting from the rest of the collaborative experience. Our ConferenceXP-powered I-MINDS application currently offers five different components for enhancing collaboration and sup-porting moderator decision making by …

Anticipating Semilinear Spdes (International Conference Modern Perpspectives In Real And Stochastic Analysis), Salah-Eldin A. Mohammed

Miscellaneous (presentations, translations, interviews, etc)

No abstract provided.

Accumulation Of Pathological Tau Species And Memory Loss In A Conditional Model Of Tauopathy, Zdenek Berger, Hanno Roder, Amanda Hanna, Vijayaraghavan Rangachari, Mei Yue, Zbigniew Wszolek, Karen Ashe, Joshua Knight, Dennis Dickson, Cathy Andorfer, Terrone L. Rosenberry, Jada Lewis, Mike Hutton, Christopher Janus

Faculty Publications

Neurofibrillary tangles (NFTs) are a pathological hallmark of Alzheimer's disease and other tauopathies, but recent studies in a conditional mouse model of tauopathy (rTg4510) have suggested that NFT formation can be dissociated from memory loss and neurodegeneration. This suggests that NFTs are not the major neurotoxic tau species, at least during the early stages of pathogenesis. To identify other neurotoxic tau protein species, we performed biochemical analyses on brain tissues from the rTg4510 mouse model and then correlated the levels of these tau proteins with memory loss. We describe the identification and characterization of two forms of tau multimers (140 …

The Successful Eradication Of Introduced Roof Rats (Rattus Rattus) From Buck Island Using Diphacinone, Followed By An Irruption Of House Mice (Mus Musculus), Gary W. Witmer, Frank Boyd, Zandy Hillis-Starr

United States Department of Agriculture Wildlife Services: Staff Publications

The United States National Park Service and the United States Wildlife Services made a planned and sustained effort to eradicate the introduced roof rats (Rattus rattus) from Buck Island Reef National Monument in the Caribbean Sea during 1998–2000. The rats were causing substantial damage to a variety of the 80-ha island’s floral and faunal resources. An island-wide grid of elevated bait stations containing anticoagulant (0.005% diphacinone; 50 ppm) rodenticide bait blocks were used to eradicate the rats. The bait stations were modified several times to assure ready access by rats while minimizing access by non-target animals, especially crabs …

Complete Shrinking Ricci Solitons Have Finite Fundamental Group, William Wylie

Mathematics - All Scholarship

We show that if a complete Riemannian manifold supports a vector field such that the Ricci tensor plus the Lie derivative of the metric with respect to the vector field has a positive lower bound, then the fundamental group is finite. In particular, it follows that complete shrinking Ricci solitons and complete smooth metric measure spaces with a positive lower bound on the Bakry-Emery tensor have finite fundamental group. The method of proof is to generalize arguments of Garcia-Rio and Fernandez-Lopez in the compact case.

The Sun-Like Activity Of The Solar Twin 18 Scorpii, Jeffrey C. Hall, Gregory W. Henry, G. Wesley Lockwood

Information Systems and Engineering Management Research Publications

We present the results of 10 yr of complementary spectroscopic and photometric observations of the solar twin 18 Scorpii. We show that over the course of its ∼7 yr chromospheric activity cycle, 18 Sco's brightness varies in the same manner as the Sun's and with a likely total brightness variation of 0.09%, similar to the 0.1% decadal variation in the total solar irradiance.

Observer Bias In Anuran Call Surveys, Aaron Lotz, Craig R. Allen

United States Geological Survey: Staff Publications

Amphibian monitoring programs rarely question the quality of data obtained by observers and often ignore observer bias. In order to test for bias in amphibian call surveys, we sampled 29 clusters of wetlands from the Rainwater Basin, Nebraska, USA, totaling 228 functionally connected wetlands. Sampling consisted of 3-minute stops where volunteers recorded species heard and made digital recordings. Based on 627 samples, we examined 3 types of observer bias: omission, false inclusion (commission), and incorrect identification. Misidentification rates ranged from 4.2% to 18.3%. Relatively high and unquantified error rates can negatively affect the ability of monitoring programs to accurately detect …

Subdivision Surface-Based Geometric Modeling System, Fuhua Cheng

Computer Science Faculty Patents

A method for surface modeling of images to produce realistic images or to provide simulations with accurate surface information is provided. More particularly, the present invention relates to a new subdivision depth computation technique and to an improved label-driven adaptive subdivision technique for use in Catmull-Clark subdivision surface modeling systems. The method comprises computing a subdivision depth to determine the number of recursive subdivisions which may be performed on a control mesh to generate a plurality of finer mesh elements while preserving a predetermined error tolerance, and using the computed subdivision depth to construct an adaptively refined mesh that is …

Use Of Implanted Radiotransmitters To Estimate Survival Of Greater Sage-Grouse Chicks, Michael A. Gregg, Mike R. Dunbar, John A. Crawford

United States Department of Agriculture Wildlife Services: Staff Publications

Reduced chick survival has been implicated in declines of greater sage-grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus) populations. Because monitoring survival of unmarked sage-grouse chicks is difficult, radiotelemetry may be an effective technique to estimate survival rates, identify causes of mortality, and collect ecological data. Previous studies have used subcutaneous implants to attach radiotransmitters to hatchlings of several species of birds with precocial young. Previous researchers who used subcutaneous implants in free-ranging populations removed chicks from the capture location and implanted transmitters at an alternate site. Because logistics precluded removing newly hatched greater sagegrouse chicks from the field, we evaluated a method for implanting …

Coyote Investigative Behavior Following Removal Of Novel Stimuli, Daniel J. Heffernan, William F. Andelt, John A. Shivik

United States Department of Agriculture Wildlife Services: Staff Publications

Because coyotes (Canis latrans) show an aversion to novel objects, we examined the effects of the presence and removal of repellent and attractive stimuli on coyote behavior. We found a greater proportion of captive coyotes investigated 10-cm-tall cones (0.95) compared to 90-cm-tall cones (0.68) and control sites (0.81), and spent longer periods (P , 0.001 in all instances) investigating small cones (x̅ = 465 sec), compared to large cones (x̅ = 212 sec) and control sites (x̅ = 45 sec). However, investigation times at sites following removal of large cones were 1.6 and 2.3 times …