Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Assessing The Accuracy Of Some Popular Dft Methods For Computing Harmonic Vibrational Frequencies Of Water Clusters, J. Coleman Howard, Jordan D. Enyard, Gregory S. Tschumper

Chemistry Faculty Research & Creative Works

A wide range of density functional theory (DFT) methods (37 altogether), including pure, hybrid, range-separated hybrid, double-hybrid, and dispersion-corrected functionals, have been employed to compute the harmonic vibrational frequencies of eight small water clusters ranging in size from the dimer to four different isomers of the hexamer. These computed harmonic frequencies have been carefully compared to recently published benchmark values that are expected to be very close to the CCSD(T) complete basis set limit. Of the DFT methods examined here, ωB97 and ωB97X are the most consistently accurate, deviating from the reference values by less than 20 cm^-1 on …

First Occurrence Of Lithostrotion (Diphyphyllum) From The Mississippian Redwall Limestone In The Beaver Dam Mountains, Washington County, Utah, Devin M. Mclemore, Jennifer E. Hargrave

The Compass: Earth Science Journal of Sigma Gamma Epsilon

The Paleozoic stratigraphy of the Beaver Dam Mountains of southwestern Utah correlates well with the better known deposits of the Grand Canyon, Arizona. However, a detailed list of the fossil fauna from the Beaver Dam Mountains is lacking. Here we describe a rugose coral from the Mississippian Redwall Limestone from Washington Country, Utah. The rugose coral is highly recrystallized, but identified as Lithostrotion (Diphyphyllum) based on morphology and geographic extent. An analysis was conducted to determine conodont zonation, but proved inconclusive. This is the first documented case of Lithostrotion (Diphyphyllum) from the Beaver Dam Mountains.

Award To David Wuolu

The Compass: Earth Science Journal of Sigma Gamma Epsilon

No abstract provided.

Recent Advances In Accumulating Priority Queues, Na Li

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis extends the theory underlying the Accumulating Priority Queue (APQ) in three directions. In the first, we present a multi-class multi-server accumulating priority queue with Poisson arrivals and heterogeneous services. The waiting time distributions for different classes have been derived. A conservation law for systems with heterogeneous servers has been studied. We also investigate an optimization problem to find the optimal level of heterogeneity in the multi-server system. Numerical investigations through simulation are carried out to validate the model.

We next focus on a queueing system with Poisson arrivals, generally distributed service times and nonlinear priority accumulation functions. We …

A New Technique For Interpreting Depolarization Measurements Using The Crl Atmospheric Lidar In The Canadian High Arctic, Emily M. Mccullough

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Linear depolarization measurement capabilities were added to the CANDAC Rayleigh-Mie-Raman lidar (CRL) at Eureka, Nunavut, in the Canadian High Arctic. This upgrade enables inferences of the phases (liquid versus ice) of cold and mixed-phase clouds, including during polar winter. A rotating-polarizer module was installed in the lidar, and depolarization measurements were calibrated according to existing methods. An alternate calculation technique, using the lidar's existing visible Rayleigh elastic channel in combination with the new rotating polarizer channel, was developed. A detailed mathematical description of both methods and their calibrations is presented. The new method is superior to the traditional method for …

Mantle-Derived Helium In Hot Springs Of The Cordillera Blanca, Peru: Implications For Mantle-To-Crust Fluid Transfer In A Flat-Slab Subduction Setting, Dennis L. Newell, Micah J. Jessup, David R. Hilton, Colin Shaw, Cameron Hughes

Geosciences Faculty Publications

Fault-controlled hot springs in the Cordillera Blanca, Peru provide geochemical evidence of mantle-derived fluids in a modern flat-slab subduction setting. The Cordillera Blanca is an ~200km-long mountain range that contains the highest peaks in the Peruvian Andes, located in an amagmatic reach of the Andean arc. The Cordillera Blanca detachment defines the southwestern edge of the range and records a progression of top-down-to-the-west ductile shear to brittle normal faulting since ~5Ma. Hot springs, recording temperatures up to 78°C, issue along this fault zone and are CO₂-rich, near neutral, alkaline-chloride to alkaline-carbonate waters, with elevated trace metal contents including …

Comparison Theorems And Asymptotic Behavior Of Solutions Of Discrete Fractional Equations, Baoguo Jia, Lynn Erbe, Allan Peterson

Department of Mathematics: Faculty Publications

Consider the following n-th order nabla and delta fractional difference equations

rn r (a)x(t) = c(t)x(t), t 2 Na+1, x(a) > 0.

and

Va+v-1x(t) = c(t)x(t + v - 1), t 2 Na, x(a + n - 1) > 0

We establish comparison theorems by which we compare the solutions x(t) of (*) and (**) with the solutions of the equations rn r(a)x(t) = bx(t) and Dn a+v-1x(t) = bx(t + v -1), respectively, where b is a constant. We obtain four asymptotic results, one of them extends the recent result [F. M. Atici, P. W. Eloe, Rocky Mountain J. Math. 41(2011), …

Is It The Typeset Or The Type Of Statistics? Disfluent Font And Self-Disclosure, Rebecca Balebako, Eyal Peer, Laura Brandimarte, Lorrie Faith Cranor, Alessandro Acquisti

Lorrie F Cranor

Background. The security and privacy communities have become increasingly interested in results from behavioral economics and psychology to help frame decisions so that users can make better privacy and security choices. One such result in the literature suggests that cognitive disfluency (presenting questions in a hard-to-read font) reduces self-disclosure. (A. L. Alter and D. M. Oppenheimer. Suppressing secrecy through metacognitive ease cognitive fluency encourages self-disclosure. Psychological science, 20(11):1414-1420, 2009) Aim. To examine the replicability and reliability of the effect of disfluency on self-disclosure, in order to test whether such approaches might be used to promote safer security and privacy behaviors. …

A Field Trial Of Privacy Nudges For Facebook, Yang Wang, Pedro Giovanni Leon, Alessandro Acquisti, Lorrie Faith Cranor, Alain Forget, Norman Sadeh

Lorrie F Cranor

Anecdotal evidence and scholarly research have shown that Internet users may regret some of their online disclosures. To help individuals avoid such regrets, we designed two modifications to the Facebook web interface that nudge users to consider the content and audience of their online disclosures more carefully. We implemented and evaluated these two nudges in a 6-week field trial with 28 Facebook users. We analyzed participants' interactions with the nudges, the content of their posts, and opinions collected through surveys. We found that reminders about the audience of posts can prevent unintended disclosures without major burden; however, introducing a time …

Can Declared Strategy Voting Be An Effective Instrument For Group Decision-Making?, Lorrie Cranor

Lorrie F Cranor

The goal of this research is to determine whether declared strategy voting can be an effective tool for group decision-making. Declared strategy voting is a novel group decision-making procedure in which preference is specified using voting strategies - first-order mathematical functions that specify a choice in terms of zero or more parameters. This research will focus on refining the declared strategy voting concept, developing an accessible implementation of declared strategy voting that can be used for mock elections, assessing the potential impacts of declared strategy voting, and evaluating the effectiveness of declared strategy voting for group decision-making. This proposal describes …

Guess Again (And Again And Again): Measuring Password Strength By Simulating Password-Cracking Algorithms (Cmu-Cylab-11-008), Patrick Kelley, Saranga Komanduri, Michelle L. Mazurek, Richard Shay, Tim Vidas, Lujo Bauer, Nicolas Christin, Lorrie Faith Cranor, Julio Lopez

Lorrie F Cranor

Text-based passwords remain the dominant authentication method in computer systems, despite significant advancement in attackers’ capabilities to perform password cracking. In response to this threat, password composition policies have grown increasingly complex. However, there is insufficient research defining metrics to characterize password strength and evaluating password-composition policies using these metrics. In this paper, we describe an analysis of 12,000 passwords collected under seven composition policies via an online study. We develop an efficient distributed method for calculating how effectively several heuristic password-guessing algorithms guess passwords. Leveraging this method, we investigate (a) the resistance of passwords created under different conditions to …

From Facebook Regrets To Facebook Privacy Nudges, Yang Wang, Pedro Giovanni Leon, Xiaoxuan Chen, Saranga Komanduri, Gregory Norcie, Alessandro Acquisti, Lorrie Faith Cranor, Norman Sadeh

Lorrie F Cranor

As social networking sites (SNSs) gain in popularity, instances of regrets following online (over)sharing continue to be reported. In June 2010, a pierogi mascot for the Pittsburgh Pirates was fired because he posted disparaging comments about the team on his Facebook page. More recently, a high school teacher was forced to resign because she posted a picture on Facebook in which she was holding a glass of wine and a mug of beer. These incidents illustrate how, in addition to fostering socialization and interaction between friends and strangers, the ease and immediacy of communication that SNSs make possible can sometimes …

A Survey Of The Use Of Adobe Flash Local Shared Objects To Respawn Http Cookies (Cmu-Cylab-11-001), Aleecia M. Mcdonald, Lorrie Faith Cranor

Lorrie F Cranor

Website developers can use Adobe’s Flash Player product to store information locally on users’ disks with Local Shared Objects (LSOs). LSOs can be used to store state information and user identifiers, and thus can be used for similar purposes as HTTP cookies. In a paper by Soltani et al, researchers documented at least four instances of “respawning,” where users deleted their HTTP cookies only to have the HTTP cookies recreated based on LSO data. In addition, the Soltani team found half of the 100 most popular websites used Flash technologies to store information about users. Both respawning and using LSOs …

An Empirical Analysis Of Phishing Blacklists, Steve Sheng, Brad Wardman, Gary Warner, Lorrie Faith Cranor, Jason Hong, Chengshan Zhang

Lorrie F Cranor

In this paper, we study the effectiveness of phishing blacklists. We used 191 fresh phish that were less than 30 minutes old to conduct two tests on eight anti-phishing toolbars. We found that 63% of the phishing campaigns in our dataset lasted less than two hours. Blacklists were ineffective when protecting users initially, as most of them caught less than 20% of phish at hour zero. We also found that blacklists were updated at different speeds, and varied in coverage, as 47% - 83% of phish appeared on blacklists 12 hours from the initial test. We found that two tools …

Your Location Has Been Shared 5,398 Times! A Field Study On Mobile App Privacy Nudging (Cmu-Isr-14-116), Hazim Almuhimedi, Florian Schaub, Norman Sadeh, Idris Adjerid, Alessandro Acquisti, Joshua Gluck, Lorrie Cranor, Yuvraj Agarwal

Lorrie F Cranor

Smartphone users are often unaware of the data collected by apps running on their devices. We report on a study that evaluates the benefits of giving users an app permission manager and of sending them nudges intended to raise their awareness of the data collected by their apps. Our study provides both qualitative and quantitative evidence that these approaches are complementary and can each play a significant role in empowering users to more effectively control their privacy. For instance, even after a week with access to the permission manager, participants benefited from nudges showing them how often some of their …

The Privacy And Security Behaviors Of Smartphone App Developers, Rebecca Balebako, Abigail Marsh, Jialiu Lin, Jason I. Hong, Lorrie Faith Cranor

Lorrie F Cranor

Smartphone app developers have to make many privacy-related decisions about what data to collect about endusers, and how that data is used. We explore how app developers make decisions about privacy and security. Additionally, we examine whether any privacy and security behaviors are related to characteristics of the app development companies. We conduct a series of interviews with 13 app developers to obtain rich qualitative information about privacy and security decision-making. We use an online survey of 228 app developers to quantify behaviors and test our hypotheses about the relationship between privacy and security behaviors and company characteristics. We find …

Design And Implementation Of A Practical Security-Conscious Electronic Polling System, Lorrie Cranor, Ron Cytron

Lorrie F Cranor

We present the design and implementation of Sensus, a practical, secure and private system for conducting surveys and elections over computer networks. Expanding on the work of Fujioka, Okamoto, and Ohta, Sensus uses blind signatures to ensure that only registered voters can vote and that each registered voter only votes once, while at the same time maintaining voters' privacy. Sensus allows voters to verify independently that their votes were counted correctly, and anonymously challenge the results should their votes be miscounted. We outline seven desirable properties of voting systems and show that Sensus satisfied these properties well, in some cases …

“I Read My Twitter The Next Morning And Was Astonished” A Conversational Perspective On Twitter Regrets, Manya Sleeper, Justin Cranshaw, Patrick Kelley, Blase Ur, Alessandro Acquisti, Lorrie Cranor, Norman Sadeh

Lorrie F Cranor

We present the results of an online survey of 1,221 Twitter users, comparing messages individuals regretted either saying during in-person conversations or posting on Twitter. Participants generally reported similar types of regrets in person and on Twitter. In particular, they often regretted messages that were critical of others. However, regretted messages that were cathartic/expressive or revealed too much information were reported at a higher rate for Twitter. Regretted messages on Twitter also reached broader audiences. In addition, we found that participants who posted on Twitter became aware of, and tried to repair, regret more slowly than those reporting in-person regrets. …

Rainfall Accumulation In Clarksville, Tennessee 2015093 To 2015121, Jessica Mae Bender

Graduate Student Publications and Other Works

The purpose of this project was to collect rainfall samples and record the data in such a way that tested a hypothesis. My hypothesis is that the area in Clarksville, Tennessee where the samples are collected will collect up to eight inches of rain for the thirteen week time span.

Stochastic Optimal Control For Online Seller Under Reputational Mechanisms, Milan Bradonij', Matthew Causley, Albert Cohen

Mathematics Publications

In this work we propose and analyze a model which addresses the pulsing behavior of sellers in an online auction (store). This pulsing behavior is observed when sellers switch between advertising and processing states. We assert that a seller switches her state in order to maximize her profit, and further that this switch can be identified through the seller’s reputation. We show that for each seller there is an optimal reputation, i.e., the reputation at which the seller should switch her state in order to maximize her total profit. We design a stochastic behavioral model for an online seller, which …

The Effect Of Manure Application Method On Nutrient And Microbial Runoff Transport And Soil Biological Health Indicators, Nicole R. Schuster

Department of Biological Systems Engineering: Dissertations and Theses

Two projects were completed to provide significant new information to the agricultural industry regarding the environmental implications and soil health impacts related to land application of swine manure. The first study reports on the runoff transport of nutrients and microbials as affected by manure application method and time following application. The second study provides information about the effect of application method and time following application on soil health indicators using arthropod abundance and diversity as a biological indicator. The information gained through these studies will provide beneficial information to the pork industry on the impact of manure application method and …

Uses Of Diaryliodonium Salts And Methods For Their Synthesis, Jordan M. Veness

Department of Chemistry: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Diaryliodonium salts have been studied continuously since the first report of their synthesis in 1894. Diaryliodonium salts are I(III) derivatives that are air- and moisturestable. The reactivity of these compounds resembles the organometallic chemistry of heavy transition metal ions such as Pb(IV), Hg(II), Th(III), and Pd(II). A significant advantage of diaryliodonium salts is that they can carry undergo many of the aryl functionalization reactions of heavy metal organometallic complexes, yet they have little to no toxicity and they are relatively inexpensive to prepare. The DiMagno laboratory uses diaryliodonium salts as precursors in the final synthetic step of radiopharmaceuticals; given that …

Dynamic Data Management In A Data Grid Environment, Björn Barrefors

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

A data grid is a geographically distributed set of resources providing a facility for computationally intensive analysis of large datasets to a large number of geographically distributed users. In the scientific community, data grids have become increasingly popular as scientific research is driven by large datasets. Until recently, developments in data management for data grids have focused on management of data at lower layers in the data grid architecture. With dataset sizes expected to approach exabyte scale in coming years, data management in data grids are facing a new set of challenges. In particularly, the problem of automatically placing and …

The Minimum And Other Free Energies For Non-Linear Materials With Memory., John Murrough Golden

Articles

Expressions are obtained for free energies of materials with a certain type of non-linear constitutive relation. In particular, the minimum and related free energies are considered in some detail. Minimal states are defined for these materials, and it is shown that any free energy yielding a linear constitutive equation that is a functional of the minimal state has a counterpart in the non-linear case which is also a minimal state functional in this more general context. These results are explored for simple examples, including discrete spectrum materials.

Paris Talks: Geography & Community, Juliet Pinto

Sea Level Rise Collection

No abstract provided.

Paris Talks: Energizing Cognitive Dissonance, Juliet Pinto

Sea Level Rise Collection

No abstract provided.

Forecasting Climate Change Impacts On The Distribution Of Wetland Habitat In The Midwestern United States, Heath Garris, Randall Mitchell, Lauchlan Fraser, Linda Barrett

Randall J. Mitchell

Shifting precipitation patterns brought on by climate change threaten to alter the future distribution of wetlands. We developed a set of models to understand the role climate plays in determining wetland formation on a landscape scale and to forecast changes in wetland distribution for the Midwestern United States. These models combined 35 climate variables with 21 geographic and anthropogenic factors thought to encapsulate other major drivers of wetland distribution for the Midwest. All models successfully recreated a majority of the variation in current wetland area within the Midwest, and showed that wetland area was significantly associated with climate, even when …

The Firece Green Fire: Vol. 6 Issue 12, Wofford College Environmental Studies Program

The Fierce Green Fire

No abstract provided.

On The Stellar Companion To The Exoplanet Hosting Star 30 Arietis B, S. R. Kane, T. Barclay, M. Hartmann, A. P. Hatzes, Eric L. N. Jensen, D. R. Ciardi, D. Huber, J. T. Wright, E. V. Quintana

Physics & Astronomy Faculty Works

A crucial aspect of understanding planet formation is determining the binarity of the host stars. Results from radial velocity (RV) surveys and the follow-up of Kepler exoplanet candidates have demonstrated that stellar binarity certainly does not exclude the presence of planets in stable orbits and the configuration may in fact be relatively common. Here we present new results for the 30 Arietis system which confirms that the B component hosts both planetary and stellar companions. Keck AO imaging provides direct detection of the stellar companion and additional RV data are consistent with an orbiting star. We present a revised orbit …

College Of Engineering Senior Design Competition Fall 2015, University Of Nevada, Las Vegas

Fred and Harriet Cox Senior Design Competition Projects

Part of every UNLV engineering student’s academic experience, the senior design project stimulates engineering innovation and entrepreneurship. Each student in their senior year chooses, plans, designs, and prototypes a product in this required element of the curriculum. A capstone to the student’s educational career, the senior design project encourages the student to use everything learned in the engineering program to create a practical, real world solution to an engineering challenge. The senior design competition helps focus the senior students in increasing the quality and potential for commercial application for their design projects. Judges from local industry evaluate the projects on …