Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Early Winter Feeding On Elm Bark By Eastern Fox Squirrels Near The Western Range Terminus, Dessa K. Montgomery, Raymond S. Matlack

The Prairie Naturalist

Fox squirrels (Sciurus niger) feed on >30 different types of food across their extensive range ~Korschgen 1981) including tree buds, flowers, fruits, seeds, and, on occasion, bark. For a large portion of the year, fox squirrels rely heavily on tree seeds (Koprowski 1991). For three consecutive years (2007-2009), we observed fox squirrels feeding on bark of elm trees ( Ulmus sp.) on the campus of West Texas A&M University, Canyon, Texas. Squirrels began feeding on bark in late November shortly after leaves had fallen off the trees and continued almost daily throughout the winter. In late February, when …

Evaluating The Impacts Of Black-Tailed Prairie Dogs On Vegetation In Traditional And Non-Traditional Habitats, Erin M. Lehmer, Laurel Hartley, Jesse Lanci, Charlie Kolb

The Prairie Naturalist

The wildland-urban interface (WUI), defined as areas where human development meets undeveloped wildland (Radeloff et al. 2005), is a focal area for humanwildlife interactions in many communities of the western United States, particularly in those areas that have experienced rapid and expansive human population growth. Since 1960, conversion of rural to urban land has more than doubled in the United States (Theobald 2001). The eastern front range of the Rocky Mountains has experienced one of the most rapid urban expansions in the country, with approximately 110,000 hectares of undeveloped rural land being converted to human-developed land every year between 1992 …

The Yao Graph Y6 Is A Spanner, Joseph O'Rourke

Computer Science: Faculty Publications

We prove that Y₆ is a spanner. Y₆ is the Yao graph on a set of planar points, which has an edge from each point x to a closest point y within each of the six angular cones of 60^◦ surrounding x .

Phase Transitions Of The Generalized Contact Process With Two Absorbing States, Man Young Lee, Thomas Vojta

Physics Faculty Research & Creative Works

We investigate the generalized contact process with two absorbing states in one space dimension by means of large-scale Monte Carlo simulations. Treating the creation rate of active sites between inactive domains as an independent parameter leads to a rich phase diagram. In addition to the conventional active and inactive phases we find a parameter region where the simple contact process is inactive, but an infinitesimal creation rate at the boundary between inactive domains is sufficient to take the system into the active phase. Thus, the generalized contact process has two different phase transition lines. The point separating them shares some …

First Mediterranean Conference On Classical And Quantum Gravity (Mccqg 2009): Preface, Spyros Basilakos, Mariano Cadoni, Marco Cavaglia, Theodosios Christodoulakis, Elias C. Vagenas

Physics Faculty Research & Creative Works

No abstract provided.

Why Don’T Rats And Mice Vomit? A Behavioral And Anatomical Investigation, C. C. Horn, National Wildlife Res. Ctr, G.R. Gathright, B. Yates, P.L. Andrews

United States Department of Agriculture Wildlife Services: Staff Publications

Laboratory rats and mice are known to lack a vomiting response and the dimensions of the abdominal esophagus might be an important constraint (Andrews, 1995, Physiol. Zool.). However, a broad evaluation of Rodentia is lacking. Here we determined the behavioral responses and esophageal and diaphragm anatomy from 4 of the 5 Suborders.Weused prototypical emetic agents, apomorphine (s.c.), veratrine (s.c.), and copper sulfate (i.g.), which are thought to produce emesis by action on the area postrema, nodose ganglia, and vagal afferent fibers, respectively. None of the rodents, including nutria (Myocastor coypus), beavers (Castor canadensis), mountain beavers …

Immunocontraception In Male Feral Swine Treated With A Recombinant Gonadotropin-Releasing Hormone Vaccine, Tyler A. Campbell, Michelle R. Garcia, Lowell A. Miller, Martha A. Ramirez, David B. Long, Jean-Baptiste Marchand, Fergal Hill

United States Department of Agriculture Wildlife Services: Staff Publications

Objective: To determine if a recombinant gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH) vaccine is a potential immunocontraceptive agent for juvenile male feral swine.

Results: As expected, a single dose of GonaCon vaccine reduced testes mass, serum testosterone, and percent normal tubules, and restricted sperm development at each stage. These reductions in reproductive development were associated with elevated GnRH antibodies. The single injection of rGnRH was not as effective in reducing these reproductive parameters; however, the two-dose injection of rGnRH was as effective as the single injection of GonaCon.

A Review Of Existing And Potential New World And Australasian Vertebrate Pesticides With A Rationale For Linking Use Patterns To Registration Requirements, Charles T. Eason, Kathleen A. Fagerstone, John D. Eisemann, Simon Humphrys, Jeanette R. O’Hare, Steven J. Lapidge

United States Department of Agriculture Wildlife Services: Staff Publications

Registration is a necessarily sophisticated evaluation process applied to vertebrate pesticide products. Although conducted to minimize any potential impacts upon public health, the environment and food production, the all-encompassing process of registration can stifle innovation. Vertebrate pesticides are rarely used to control pest animals in food crops. In contrast to agrochemicals, relatively small amounts of vertebrate pesticides are used (50.1%), usually in solid or paste baits, and generally by discrete application methods rather than by broad-scale spray applications. We present a hierarchy or sliding scale of typical data requirements relative to application techniques, to help clarify an evolving science-based approach …

Water Quality And Watershed Conditions In The Upper Illinois River Watershed, Brian Haggard, Andrew Sharpley, Leslie Massey

Technical Reports

The Illinois River and its tributaries have many uses that have been designated by the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality including fisheries, aquatic life, primary contact waters, secondary contact waters, drinking water supply, and agricultural and industrial water supply, and water quality affects whether these uses can be supported. Since water quality can be quite complex, many types of measurements can be used as water quality indicators; some common water quality measurements include pH, dissolved oxygen concentration, and conductivity. More complicated measurements include determining nutrients, sediment and bacteria in the water, as well as assessing the aquatic life—aquatic insects, fish, …

Handbook Of Best Management Practices For The Upper Illinois River Watershed And Other Regional Watersheds, B.E. Haggard, Andrew Sharpley, Leslie Massey

Technical Reports

Management actions are strategies carried out by stakeholders that are designed to implement water quality protection and restoration activities with a watershed. This publication presents a range of beneficial management actions from simple to complex that address the pollutant potential that is common across the watershed landscape of northwest Arkansas. Some management actions can be undertaken by any watershed stakeholder at any time, while others need to be carefully planned or lobbied to local and state government. The following chapters address potential management actions that can be taken by individuals or groups at households, businesses, institutions, municipalities, industrial facilities, farms, …

Virginia Shellfish Aquaculture Situation And Outlook Report : Results Of The 2009 Virginia Shellfish Aquaculture Crop Reporting Survey, Thomas J. Murray, Michael J. Oesterling

Reports

Virginia’s shellfish aquaculture industry continues to add significant value to the State’s seafood marketplace. While Virginia’s watermen harvest hard clams and oysters from the State’s public resources, they also grow shellfish for consumers. In recent years, following the lead of the hard clam industry, there has been a significant transition toward intensive aquaculture of native oysters. The once-extensive oyster planting has disappeared primarily as a result of endemic oyster diseases and wildlife predation of seed oysters. It has been replaced by an expanding aquaculture sector, which is based on improved culture techniques and disease-resistant oyster seed. While these trends are …

Application Of Jpeg 2000 Wavelet Compression To Multibeam Echosounder Mid-Water Acoustic Refectivity Measurements, Jonathan Beaudoin

Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping

No abstract provided.

Hydrographic Products/Services As A Fundamental Component Of The E-Navigation Concept Of Operation, Lee Alexander, Robert Ward

Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping

e-Navigation is a recent initiative aimed at moving traditional maritime navigation towards a connected digital environment. Defined by the International Maritime Organization (IMO) as “the harmonized collection, integration, exchange, presentation and analysis of maritime information onboard and ashore by electronic means to enhance birth-to-birth navigation and related services, for safety and security at sea and protection of the marine environment”, e-Navigation is not a new system of equipment but more an operational concept. Three significant outcomes are envisioned: 1) Shipboard navigation systems will benefit from the integration of own ship sensors, supporting information, standard user interface, and a comprehensive system …

Seamless Online Distribution Of Amundsen Multibeam Data, James Muggah, Ian Church, Jonathan Beaudoin, John E. Hughes Clarke

Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping

Since 2003, all underway multibeam and sub-bottom data from the Canadian Coast Guard Ship Amundsen has been posted online within approximately six months of the end of each cruise. A custom interface allowing the user to access 15' latitude by 30' longitude mapsheets was implemented in 2006, allowing the user to download the bathymetric and backscatter data at 10 metre resolution. While this interface matched the underlying data management scheme implemented at the University of New Brunswick, the zoom and pan capability was at a fixed scale with limited contextual data. In the past few years, with the introduction of …

Modeling The Effect Of Oceanic Internal Waves On The Accuracy Of Multibeam Echosounders, Travis Hamilton, Jonathan Beaudoin

Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping

When ray bending corrections are applied to multibeam echosounder (MBES) data, it is assumed that the varying layers of sound speed lie along horizontally stratified planes. In many areas internal waves occur at the interface where the water’s density changes abruptly (a pycnocline), this density gradient is often associated with a strong gradient in sound speed (a velocline). The internal wave introduces uncertainty into the echo soundings through two mechanisms: (1) tilting of the velocline, and (2) vertical oscillation of the velocline’s depth. A model has been constructed in order to examine how these effects degrade the accuracy of MBES …

New Approaches For Evaluating Lidar-Derived Shoreline, Christopher Parrish, Stephen A. White, Brian R. Calder, Shachak Pe'eri, Yuri Rzhanov

Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping

This study presents and compares two new methods of assessing the uncertainty of lidar-derived National Shoreline mapped by NOAA’s National Geodetic Survey: an empirical (ground-based) approach and a stochastic (Monte Carlo) approach. OCIS codes: (280.3640) Lidar; (120.2830) Height measurements; (000.4430) Numerical approximation and analysis

4d Multimodal Visualization And Analysis Of Seafloor Vents And Plumes, Maurice Doucet, Mark Paton, James V. Gardner, Jens Greinert

Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping

No abstract provided.

Information Hiding Using Stochastic Diffusion For The Covert Transmission Of Encrypted Images, Jonathan Blackledge

Conference papers

A principal weakness of all encryption systems is that the output data can be `seen' to be encrypted. In other words, encrypted data provides a 'flag' on the potential value of the information that has been encrypted. In this paper, we provide a novel approach to `hiding' encrypted data in a digital image. We consider an approach in which a plaintext image is encrypted with a cipher using the processes of `stochastic diffusion' and the output quantized into a 1-bit array generating a binary image cipher-text. This output is then `embedded' in a host image which is undertaken either in …

On The Ph-Optimum Of Activity And Stability Of Proteins, Kemper Tally, Emil Alexov

Publications

Biological macromolecules evolved to perform their function in specific cellular environment (subcellular compartments or tissues); therefore, they should be adapted to the biophysical characteristics of the corresponding environment, one of them being the characteristic pH. Many macromolecular properties are pH dependent, such as activity and stability. However, only activity is biologically important, while stability may not be crucial for the corresponding reaction. Here, we show that the pH-optimum of activity (the pH of maximal activity) is correlated with the pH-optimum of stability (the pH of maximal stability) on a set of 310 proteins with available experimental data. We speculate that …

Center For Watershed Excellence - 2010 Spring/Summer News, Clemson University

ICE Research News (Biannual Newsletter)

No abstract provided.

Magnetic Response Versus Lift Height Of Thin Ferromagnetic Films, Tanner Schulz, Gabe Burch, Andrew Kunz, E. Dan Dahlberg

Physics Faculty Research and Publications

The interaction between a magnetic force microscope (MFM) tip and ferromagnetic films of Ni, Co₉₀Fe₁₀ and Py with in-plane magnetization has been investigated. The measured interaction, due to the magnetizing of the films by the MFM tip field, was determined by the phase shift of the cantilever response. The tip-film separation or lift height dependent phase shift was found to be independent of the saturation magnetization of the ferromagnetic film. The result is identical for all three films and micromagnetic simulations give similar results. The reason is at a given tip-sample separation the tip induced magnetization of …

Creating Large Disturbances In The Power Grid: Methods Of Attack After Cyber Infiltration, Loren D. Sands-Ramshaw

Dartmouth College Undergraduate Theses

Researchers are pursuing methods of securing the cyber aspect of the U.S. power grid, one of the country's most critical infrastructures. An attacker who is able to infiltrate an Energy Management System (EMS) can instruct elements of the grid to function improperly or can skew the state information received by the control programs or operators. In addition, a cyber attack can combine multiple attacks and affect many physical locations at once. A study of the possible adverse effects an attack could generate can underline the urgency of improving grid security, contribute to a roadmap and priority list for security researchers, …

A Social Transitivity-Based Data Dissemination Scheme For Opportunistic Networks, Jaesung Ku, Yangwoo Ko, Jisun An, Dongman Lee

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A social-based routing protocol for opportunistic networks considers the direct delivery as forwarding metrics. By ignoring the indirect delivery through intermediate nodes, it misses chances to find paths that are better in terms of delivery ratio and time. To overcome this limitation, we propose to incorporate transitivity, which considers the indirect delivery through intermediate nodes, as one of the forwarding metrics. We also found that some message forwards do not improve the delivery performance. To reduce the number of these useless forwards, the proposed scheme forwards messages to an encountered node when the increase of total utility value is greater …

Using Hadoop And Cassandra For Taxi Data Analytics: A Feasibility Study, Alvin Jun Yong Koh, Xuan Khoa Nguyen, C. Jason Woodard

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper reports on a preliminary study to assess the feasibility of using the Open Cirrus Cloud Computing Research testbed to provide offline and online analytical support for taxi fleet operations. In the study, we benchmarked the performance gains from distributing the offline analysis of GPS location traces over multiple virtual machines using the Apache Hadoop implementation of the MapReduce paradigm. We also explored the use of the Apache Cassandra distributed database system for online retrieval of vehicle trace data. While configuring the testbed infrastructure was straightforward, we encountered severe I/O bottlenecks in running the benchmarks due to the lack …

Semantic Context Modeling With Maximal Margin Conditional Random Fields For Automatic Image Annotation, Yu Xiang, Xiangdong Zhou, Zuotao Liu, Tat-Seng Chua, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Context modeling for Vision Recognition and Automatic Image Annotation (AIA) has attracted increasing attentions in recent years. For various contextual information and resources, semantic context has been exploited in AIA and brings promising results. However, previous works either casted the problem into structural classification or adopted multi-layer modeling, which suffer from the problems of scalability or model efficiency. In this paper, we propose a novel discriminative Conditional Random Field (CRF) model for semantic context modeling in AIA, which is built over semantic concepts and treats an image as a whole observation without segmentation. Our model captures the interactions between semantic …

Anytime Planning For Decentralized Pomdps Using Expectation Maximization, Akshat Kumar, Shlomo Zilberstein

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Decentralized POMDPs provide an expressive framework for multi-agent sequential decision making. While finite-horizon DECPOMDPs have enjoyed signifcant success, progress remains slow for the infinite-horizon case mainly due to the inherent complexity of optimizing stochastic controllers representing agent policies. We present a promising new class of algorithms for the infinite-horizon case, which recasts the optimization problem as inference in a mixture of DBNs. An attractive feature of this approach is the straightforward adoption of existing inference techniques in DBNs for solving DEC-POMDPs and supporting richer representations such as factored or continuous states and actions. We also derive the Expectation Maximization (EM) …

Satrap: Data And Network Heterogeneity Aware P2p Data-Mining, Hock Kee Ang, Vivekanand Gopalkrishnan, Anwitaman Datta, Wee Keong Ng, Steven C. H. Hoi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Distributed classification aims to build an accurate classifier by learning from distributed data while reducing computation and communication cost A P2P network where numerous users come together to share resources like data content, bandwidth, storage space and CPU resources is an excellent platform for distributed classification However, two important aspects of the learning environment have often been overlooked by other works, viz., 1) location of the peers which results in variable communication cost and 2) heterogeneity of the peers' data which can help reduce redundant communication In this paper, we examine the properties of network and data heterogeneity and propose …

A Hybrid Method To Detect Deflation Fraud In Cost-Per-Action Online Advertising, Xuhua Ding

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Web advertisers prefer the cost-per-action (CPA) advertisement model whereby an advertiser pays a web publisher according to the actual amount of transactions, rather than the volume of advertisement clicks. The main obstacle for a wide deployment of this model is the deflation fraud. Namely, a dishonest advertiser under-reports the transaction count in order to discharge less. In this paper, we present a mechanism to detect such a fraud using a hybrid of cryptography and probability tools. With the assistance from a small number of users, the publisher can detect deflation fraud with a success probability growing exponentially with the fraud …

Prediction Of Protein Subcellular Localization: A Machine Learning Approach, Kyong Jin Shim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Subcellular localization is a key functional characteristic of proteins. Optimally combining available information is one of the key challenges in today's knowledge-based subcellular localization prediction approaches. This study explores machine learning approaches for the prediction of protein subcellular localization that use resources concerning Gene Ontology and secondary structures. Using the spectrum kernel for feature representation of amino acid sequences and secondary structures, we explore an SVM-based learning method that classifies six subcellular localization sites: endoplasmic reticulum, extracellular, Golgi, membrane, mitochondria, and nucleus.

Analysis And Transformation Of Pipe-Like Web Mashups For End User Programmers, Kathryn T. Stolee

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Mashups are becoming increasingly popular as end users are able to easily access, manipulate, and compose data from several web sources. To support end users, communities are forming around mashup development environments that facilitate sharing code and knowledge. We have observed, however, that end user mashups tend to suffer from several deficiencies, such as inoperable components or references to invalid data sources, and that those deficiencies are often propagated through the rampant reuse in these end user communities.

In this work, we identify and specify ten code smells indicative of deficiencies we observed in a sample of 8,051 pipe-like web …