Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Environmental Conscience And Comportment Of Youth In Dakar, Elizabeth Van Brocklin

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

The natural environment is in a state of crisis in Dakar, in Senegal, in Africa and throughout the world. Humans are the primary contributors to environmental degradation, as their activities place stress on natural ecosystems, and this stress is often most acute in the urban setting. Dakar is one major West African city where inhabitants are particularly neglectful and disrespectful of their communal environment, illustrated by the oppressive presence of mismanaged waste that pollutes the public streets. Based on the hypothesis that the general population was either unaware or misinformed of the actual state of the environment, I aimed to …

“Mangra”- Exploring The Organization Of An Environmental Education Curriculum In A Village Equipped For Sustainable Development, Abigail Phillips

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

The rapid growth of urban centers in the last century has resulted in obvious social stratification and neglect of the natural environment. Not only is the gap between rich and poor increasing, but the resources that supply urban consumption and community development are increasingly depleted without due recognition. These issues are successfully addressed in some communities by drawing example from more traditional practices of ecological management, such as water conservation and local food production. Environmental education could be utilized to aid in the relief of social issues and environmental degradation if the curriculum is specialized for each community’s circumstance. Children …

The Price Of Water: Assessment Of The Current Water Situation And Recommendation Of Technical Methodology For The Community Of Shirati, Tanzania, Max Perel-Slater

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

This study looked at the current water situation in the community of Shirati Tanzania. It took place from November 7th – 27th 2009. My sample frame was the villages in the Roche District of the Mara Region in northeastern Tanzania. My sample populations consisted of residents of three villages – Mukoma, Nyamagongo, and Shirati-Sota. I applied a four prong approach to my data collection: 1) Eight Key Informant Interviews with three local village leaders and two medical officers of the local hospital and dispensary, two water engineers and one long time resident; 2) Ninety randomly selected surveys, 30 in each …

The Story Of The Beverage Can: How Cans Are Re-Used And Recycled In The Village Of Maun, Emma Frappier

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

For a period of three weeks I spent my days wandering the streets of Maun, talking to lodge owners, restaurants, local bars, and private waste collectors investigating the ways in which beverage cans are reused, recycled, and disposed of in Maun. Ultimately I wanted to uncover the story of the beverage can in the village of Maun. Throughout my investigation I sought to answer three important questions: how, why and by who are beverage cans recycled, how do villagers reuse beverage cans, and what are the major barriers preventing more widespread reuse and recycling of beverage cans. I conducted my …

Putting Trees Back In The Hands Of Malians: L’Association Malienne Pour La Conservation De La Faune Et De L’Environnement And The Balance Between Using And Protecting Local Forests, Cara Peterson

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Products from trees provide the essential human necessities of food and shelter, as well as the means to cook and construct them with firewood and lumber. With the earth’s ever increasing population and growing industries, these needs have also risen, and forests worldwide are feeling the strain of deforestation and over usage for both commercial and household consumption. Deforestation in Africa is occurring at a smaller scale than on other continents, but this does not mean it is any less damaging to local ecosystems (Bessassen, 2009, p. 76). In fact, African forests are particularly stressed because approximately 90% of the …

Effects Of Re-Grown Forest Habitat On Lemur Catta Behavior, Sophie Ackoff

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

This study examines the effects of re-grown forest habitat on L. catta behavior at Berenty Private Reserve in Southern Madagascar during the early wet season. Evaluation of the reforested area versus natural forest revealed significant differences in species composition and food availability. Though the re-grown forest showed signs of forest regeneration and total greater food availability, the natural forest of Malaza proved to contain more preferred food sources for L. catta. Behavioral observations were collected over eight full-day troop follows and showed significant differences in feeding behavior, activity budget, and intra-troop and inter-troop aggressions. The WELL troop in Ankoba, the …

The Elusiveness Of Light: The Difficulty With Harnessing The Omnipresent Solar Energy In Africa, Hai-Vu Phan

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

The world is currently facing an energy crisis. Our dependency on oil and natural gas has led to many global problems, such as OPEC’s oil hikes which have disrupted economies everywhere and caused oil dependent countries to suffer. Our huge consumption of oil has also led to the global warming catastrophe that we currently must combat. The world must find a new energy source soon, or more environmental, political, social, and economic problems will occur. Solar energy’s potential has been recognized for many decades, and its abundant and limitless supply makes it the perfect new form of energy. Solar energy …

Evaluations Of Nam Forecasts On Midtropospheric Perturbation-Induced Convective Storms Over The U.S. Northern Plains, Shih-Yu (Simon) Wang, T. C. Chen, S. E. Taylor

Plants, Soils, and Climate Faculty Publications

In the U.S. northern plains, summer progressive convective storms that occur in weakly forced environ- ments are often coupled with short-wave perturbations that are embedded in the midlevel northwesterly flow. These midtropospheric perturbations (MPs) are capable of inducing propagating convection that contributes to a majority of the rainfall over the northern plains during July and August. There is a possibility that the difficulties of numerical weather prediction models in forecasting summer convective rainfall over the northern plains are partly attributed to their deficiency in forecasting MPs. The present study tests this possibility through examining operational forecasts by the North American …

Sdss J102347.6+003841: A Millisecond Radio Pulsar Binary That Had A Hot Disk During 2000-2001, Zhongxiang Wang, Anne M. Archibald, John R. Thorstensen, Victoria M. Kaspi

Dartmouth Scholarship

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) source J102347.6+003841 was recently revealed to be a binary 1.69 ms radio pulsar with a 4.75 hr orbital period and a ~0.2 M _☉ companion. Here, we analyze the SDSS spectrum of the source in detail. The spectrum was taken on 2001 February 1, when the source was in a bright state and showed broad, double-peaked hydrogen and helium lines—dramatically different from the G-type absorption spectrum seen from 2002 May onward. The lines are consistent with emission from a disk around the compact primary. We derive properties of the disk by fitting the SDSS …

Structure Of The Photochemical Reaction Path Populated Via Promotion Of Cf2i2 Into Its First Excited State, Patrick Z. El-Khoury, Alexander N. Tarnovsky, Igor Schapiro, Mikhail N. Ryazantsev, Massimo Olivucci

Chemistry Faculty Publications

The photochemical reaction path following the promotion of CF2I2 into its lowest-lying excited electronic singlet state has been modeled using ab initio multiconfigurational quantum chemical calculations. It is found that a conical intersection drives the electronically excited CF2I2* species either to the CF2I + I radical pair or back to the starting CF2I2 structure. The structures of the computed relaxation pathways explain the photoproduct selectivity previously observed in the gas phase. Furthermore, the results provide the basis for explaining the condensed-phase photochemistry of CF2I2.

Evolving Guidance For Tidal Wetlands Management, Center For Coastal Resources Management, Virginia Institute Of Marine Science

Reports

Rivers & Coast is a periodic publication of the Center for Coastal Resources Management, Virginia Institute of Marine Science. The goal of Rivers & Coast is to keep readers well informed of current scientific understanding behind key environmental issues related to watershed rivers and coastal ecosystems of the Chesapeake Bay.

A Smart-Phone Application For Improving Communication Skills In Children With Autism, Lakshmi Padmaja Battagiri

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

The prevalence of autism, a complex neurobiological disorder, has grown at a staggering rate in the recent past. Today, one out of 150 American children is diagnosed with autism. Generally, the disorder appears during an individual's first three years of life of and persists through his/her entire life span. The individual faces various social interaction, communication and behavioral problems. Developmental disabilities, extreme withdrawal, lack of social behaviour, severe language and attention deficits, repetitive behaviours and limited interests are the characteristics of this disorder. There is no verified cure yet, but several therapies and intervention systems especially focused on the early …

Rapid Prototyping Augmented Skin Pathology For Medical Simulation And Training, Annette Castelino

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

The goal of this research is to study how augmented reality technology could be applied in training medical students for better clinical practice and diagnosis in the treatment of skin conditions using skin pathology prototypes. Described within this thesis is an innovative method of producing skin abscess prototypes that augment the Standardized Patient (SP) for simulation purposes.

The method adopted is a combination of the cost-effective technique of rapid prototyping (RP) — 3D inkjet printing and 3D graphics modeling. The visual and haptic realism of these developed prototypes along with the use of moulage enable the SP to exhibit realistic …

A Robust Method To Detect Concealed Weapons, Anand Gone

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Concealed weapons detection is a large problem that is faced by the Police Department nowadays. There are many disasters caused by poor detection of the weapons. Since public safety is at risk there is a need to design an efficient detector that can detect the weapons hidden under the clothing. This thesis presents a novel method for detecting concealed weapons under clothing using image processing techniques. In this thesis IR imagery is used to capture an image which works on the principle of law of black body radiation. Image thresholding is performed on the captured data using Sauvola's adaptive thresholding …

Apollonius Of Perga: Historical Background And Conic Sections, Ashley Allen

Senior Honors Theses

Apollonius of Perga greatly contributed to geometry, specifically in the area of conics. Through the study of the “Golden Age” of Greek mathematics from about 300 to 200 B.C., Apollonius, who lived from about 262 to 190 B.C., is seen as an innovative geometer whose theories were eventually proved factual. By investigating his theorems on how the different kinds of conic sections are formed, the standard equations for each conic will be better understood. The achievements that have been made as a result of conics include flashlights to whispering galleries.

Development Of Chemometric Models And Calibration Transfer For Rapid Diesel And Jet Fuel Analysis Using Near Infrared Spectroscopy, Christopher Matthew Larkin

Chemistry & Biochemistry Theses & Dissertations

Fuel quality assurance and analysis, as it pertains to the United States armed forces, is crucial for maintaining operability and upholding safety regulations with respect to fuel class. Currently a great amount of effort, money and manpower are dedicated to this task as fuel analysis takes place in off-site laboratories where quality assessment and property determination is performed manually by highly qualified lab technicians. This presents the military with a logistics problem with respect to refueling, transport, and fuel storage as the typical tum-around time is 1-2 weeks. In this thesis it has been demonstrated that near-infrared spectroscopy, in conjunction …

Mining Quantified Temporal Rules: Formalism, Algorithms, And Evaluation, David Lo, Ganesan Ramalingam, Venkatesh-Prasad Ranganath, Kapil Vaswani

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Libraries usually impose constraints on how clients should use them. Often these constraints are not well-documented. In this paper, we address the problem of recovering such constraints automatically, a problem referred to as specification mining. Given some client programs that use a given library, we identify constraints on the library usage that are (almost) satisfied by the given set of clients.The class of rules we target for mining combines simple binary temporal operators with state predicates (involving equality constraints) and quantification. This is a simple yet expressive subclass of temporal properties that allows us to capture many common API usage …

Secure Mobile Agents With Designated Hosts, Qi Zhang, Yi Mu, Minji Zhang, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Mobile agents often travel in a hostile environment where their security and privacy could be compromised by any party including remote hosts in which agents visit and get services. It was proposed in the literature that the host visited by an agent should jointly sign a service agreement with the agent's home, where a proxy-signing model was deployed and every host in the agent system can sign. We observe that this actually poses a serious problem in that a host that should be excluded from an underlying agent network could also send a signed service agreement. In order to solve …

Streaming 3d Meshes Using Spectral Geometry Images, Ying He, Boon Seng Chew, Dayong Wang, Steven C. H. Hoi, Lap Pui Chau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The transmission of 3D models in the form of Geometry Images (GI) is an emerging and appealing concept due to the reduction in complexity from R3 to image space and wide availability of mature image processing tools and standards. However, geometry images often suffer from the artifacts and error during compression and transmission. Thus, there is a need to address the artifact reduction, error resilience and protection of such data information during the transmission across an error prone network. In this paper, we introduce a new concept, called Spectral Geometry Images (SGI), which naturally combines the powerful spectral analysis with …

Localizing Volumetric Motion For Action Recognition In Realistic Videos, Xiao Wu, Chong-Wah Ngo, Jintao Li, Yongdong Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper presents a novel motion localization approach for recognizing actions and events in real videos. Examples include StandUp and Kiss in Hollywood movies. The challenge can be attributed to the large visual and motion variations imposed by realistic action poses. Previous works mainly focus on learning from descriptors of cuboids around space time interest points (STIP) to characterize actions. The size, shape and space-time position of cuboids are fixed without considering the underlying motion dynamics. This often results in large set of fragmentized cuboids which fail to capture long-term dynamic properties of realistic actions. This paper proposes the detection …

Towards Google Challenge: Combining Contextual And Social Information For Web Video Categorization, Xiao Wu, Wan-Lei Zhao, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Web video categorization is a fundamental task for web video search. In this paper, we explore the Google challenge from a new perspective by combing contextual and social information under the scenario of social web. The semantic meaning of text (title and tags), video relevance from related videos, and user interest induced from user videos, are integrated to robustly determine the video category. Experiments on YouTube videos demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed solution. The performance reaches 60% improvement compared to the traditional text based classifiers.

Distribution-Based Concept Selection For Concept-Based Video Retrieval, Juan Cao, Hongfang Jing, Chong-Wah Ngo, Yongdong Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Query-to-concept mapping plays one of the keys to concept-based video retrieval. Conventional approaches try to find concepts that are likely to co-occur in the relevant shots from the lexical or statistical aspects. However, the high probability of co-occurrence alone cannot ensure its effectiveness to distinguish the relevant shots from the irrelevant ones. In this paper, we propose distribution-based concept selection (DBCS) for query-to-concept mapping by analyzing concept score distributions of within and between relevant and irrelevant sets. In view of the imbalance between relevant and irrelevant examples, two variants of DBCS are proposed respectively by considering the two-sided and onesided …

Semantic Context Transfer Across Heterogeneous Sources For Domain Adaptive Video Search, Yu-Gang Jiang, Chong-Wah Ngo, Shih-Fu Chang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Automatic video search based on semantic concept detectors has recently received significant attention. Since the number of available detectors is much smaller than the size of human vocabulary, one major challenge is to select appropriate detectors to response user queries. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that leverages heterogeneous knowledge sources for domain adaptive video search. First, instead of utilizing WordNet as most existing works, we exploit the context information associated with Flickr images to estimate query-detector similarity. The resulting measurement, named Flickr context similarity (FCS), reflects the co-occurrence statistics of words in image context rather than textual …

First Acm Sigmm International Workshop On Social Media (Wsm'09), Suzanne Boll, Steven C. H. Hoi, Jiebo Luo, Rong Jin, Dong Xu, Irwin King

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

No abstract provided.

Monte Carlo Model Of Light Propagation In Tissues And The Effects Of Phase Changes On The Light Intensity, Rakesh Choula

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Lasers, due to their unique properties, have a wide range of applications in the medical field. For accurate laser treatments that focus on bio-tissues, prior knowledge of the amount of laser power, spot size and its irradiation time are necessary. In order to predict the effects of lasers on tissues and their bio-effects, a first necessary step is the creation of a model that can predict the temperature distributions within the tissue following laser excitation. This involves modeling light propagation through the tissue with inclusion of internal scattering, and assessment of the energy deposited by the incoming photons. The next …

Fault-Tolerance And Recovery In Wireless Sensor Networks, Kevin M. Somervill

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

The topic of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) has gained considerable attention in the research community due to the variety of applications and interesting challenges in developing and deploying such networks. The typical WSN is significantly energy constrained and often deployed in harsh or even hostile environments, resulting in sensor nodes that are prone to failure. Failing nodes alter the topology of the network resulting in segmented routing paths and lost messages, ultimately reducing network efficiency. These issues spur the desire to develop energy-efficient, Fault-Tolerant (FT) algorithms that enable the network to persist in spite of the failed nodes. This work …

Solvent Dependent Morphologies In Thiol-Ene Photopolymerization: A Facile Route To Synthesis Of Resorcinarene Nanocapsules, Zaharoula Marie Kalaitzis

Chemistry & Biochemistry Theses & Dissertations

Synthesis of morphologically distinct polymeric nanostructures is vital for their wide ranging applications from nanomedicine to material science. Among various polymeric nanostructures, nanocapsules in particular have attracted a lot of attention as nanoreactors and drug delivery vehicles in nanomedicine. Often, synthesis of nanocapsules is achieved by template-based approaches. A direct, template-free method for the fabrication of nanocapsules and a variety of other morphologically distinct polymeric architectures was developed. The photopolymerization of a resorcinarene thiol-ene surfactant in various solvents lead to the formation of nanocapsules, nanoparticles, fibers, distorted honeycomb-like lattices, and sheets. The progress of the polymerization reaction and the morphology …

Image Registration Using Conformal Log Polar Mapping, Bala Krishna Vadapally

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Image Registration is the process of aligning, or overlaying two images of the same scene that were taken at different times and/or from different viewing angles and/or by sensors with different modalities or resolutions. The variations in the imaging environment induce the difference between the images of the same scene. In our situation, we have two images of the same scene taken with two sensors, one in the visible and the other in the infrared (IR) domain. The cameras are placed adjacent to each other on a stable platform, and the images are captured almost simultaneously. This means that the …

Non-Smooth Solutions To Least Squares Problems, Jodi Mead

Jodi Mead

In an attempt to overcome the ill-posedness or illconditioning of inverse problems, regularization methods are implemented by introducing assumptions on the solution. Common regularization methods include total variation, L-curve, Generalized Cross Validation (GCV), and the discrepancy principle. It is generally accepted that all of these approaches except total variation unnecessarily smooth solutions, mainly because the regularization operator is in an L2 norm. Alternatively, statistical approaches to ill-posed problems typically involve specifying a priori information about the parameters in the form of Bayesian inference. These approaches can be more accurate than typical regularization methods because the regularization term is weighted with …

An Aztec 1.1mm Survey Of The Goods-N Field – Ii. Multiwavelength Identifications And Redshift Distribution, Thushara Perera, Edward Chapin, Alexandra Pope, Douglas Scott, Itziar Aretxaga, Jason Austermann, Ranga-Ram Chary, Kristen Coppin, Mark Halpern, David Hughes, James Lowenthal, Glenn Morrison, Kimberly Scott, Grant Wilson, Min Yun

Thushara A. Perera

No abstract provided.