Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

The Nebraska Mesonet: Technical Overview Of An Automated State Weather Network, Martha Shulski, Stonie Cooper, Glen Roebke, Allen L. Dutcher

School of Natural Resources: Faculty Publications

The Nebraska Mesonet was established in 1981 as one of the nation’s first automated state weather networks. ‘‘Automated’’ is defined by the nature of the observations being made and recorded by machine, as opposed to observations made and recorded manually. At the time of inception, the five observing locations were geared toward servicing agricultural production applications. The Nebraska Mesonet has grown to 69 stations (as of 2018) and is now a multipurpose environmental observing network under the Nebraska State Climate Office (NSCO). The network is composed of environmental observation stations, sited using best practices for mesoscale and microscale environment situations. …

Niobrara National Scenic River, Socioeconomic Monitoring Pilot Implementation, Summer 2016, Resource Systems Group

United States National Park Service: Publications

Executive Summary

This report describes the results of a visitor study at Niobrara National Scenic River (NSR) conducted from July 15 through July 24, 2016. During the sampling period, 253 visitor groups were contacted to participate in the survey. Of those groups, 217 agreed to participate in the study by accepting a mail-back survey packet. Questionnaires were completed and returned by 110 visitor groups, resulting in a completion rate of 51% among those visitor groups that agreed to participate in the study and an overall response rate of 43% for the study.

 This report profiles a systematic random sample …

Quality Assurance Plan For Monitoring White-Tailed Deer In The Heartland Inventory And Monitoring Network, United States National Park Service, Heartland Inventory And Monitoring Network

United States National Park Service: Publications

Abstract

In accordance with guidelines set forth by the National Park Service Inventory and Monitoring Division, a quality-assurance plan has been created for use by the Heartland Inventory and Monitoring Network in the implementation of the White-tailed Deer Monitoring Protocol (HTLN 2018). This quality-assurance plan documents the standards, policies, and procedures used by the Heartland Network for activities related to the collection, processing, storage, analysis, and publication of monitoring data. The policies and procedures documented in this quality-assurance plan complement the quality-assurance plans for other monitoring activities conducted by the Heartland Network and supplement the National Inventory and Monitoring Division …

Towards Determination Of The Source And Magnitude Of Atmospheric Pco2 Change Across The Early Paleogene Hyperthermals, Ying Cui, Brian A. Schubert

Department of Earth and Environmental Studies Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

The early Paleogene greenhouse climate is punctuated by a series of extreme global warming events known as hyperthermals that are associated with massive additions of carbon to the ocean-atmosphere system. However, no existing proxies have suitable resolution to capture the change in atmospheric carbon dioxide (pCO2) across these events. Here, we reconstruct a nearly continuous record of pCO2 during the early Paleogene based on changes in terrestrial carbon isotope discrimination calculated from published high-resolution marine and terrestrial carbon isotope records. We calculate relatively stable baseline pCO2 = 569 + 250/−146 ppmv with significant increases in pCO2 at each of four …

The Santa Clara, 2018-11-01, Santa Clara University

The Santa Clara

No abstract provided.

Soil-Plant Interface, Carbon Sequestration And The Eco Physiological Growth Of Salsola Imbricata And Zygophyllum Mandaville Using Locally Grown Rhizosphere And Endophytic Bacteria, Nour Elhouda Debouza

Civil and Environmental Theses

Salsola imbricata and Zygophyllum Mandeville are halophytic plants available widely in the UAE. These two species have important environmental services such as sand dune fixation, which will potentially improve plant cover and help tackle the problem of desertification. The species were selected due to their availability and role in the desert environment of the UAE. Plants are also constantly involved in interactions with a wide range of bacteria in the soil. These plant-associated bacteria colonize the rhizosphere (rhizobacteria), and the internal plant tissues (bacterial endophytes). Endophytic bacteria are those capable of colonizing live internal plant tissues which can be isolated …

Disappearance Of Phragmites In Louisiana And Nipponaclerda Biwakoensis, Rachel Tugger

Honors Theses

No abstract provided.

From Gig Economy To Gig Education, Olga Kosheleva, Julian Viera Jr., Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Modern economy has benefited from gig economy idea, where, instead of hiring permanent employees, a company assigns each task to the person who is the most efficient in performing this task. This way, each task is performed in the best possible way -- by a person who is the most suited for this job. Why not extend this idea to education? Every student deserves the best possible teacher in every topic. So why not have a teacher who is the best in town in explaining quadratic equations teach quadratic equations to all the students from the town? In this paper, …

Should School Feel Like A Family: Lessons From Business Controversy As Interpreted By Decision Making Theory, Olga Kosheleva, Julian Viera Jr., Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Traditional business theory promoted the ideal of business as a family: everyone should feel good about each other, all employees should feel good working together towards a joint goal. Recently, however, researchers claim that the well-promoted ideal is unattainable, it is a ruse causing everyone to overwork. Instead, these researchers propose a non-emotional collaboration of adults working temporarily on a joint project. In this paper, we show that this new trend is not just based on anecdotal evidence, it actually has a solid foundation in decision theory. So maybe we should apply this new trend to teaching too - and …

Why Early Galaxies Were Pickle-Shaped: A Geometric Explanation, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

The vast majority of currently observed geometric shapes of celestial bodies can be explained by a simple symmetry idea: the initial distribution of matter is invariant with respect to shifts, rotations, and scaling, but this distribution is unstable, so we have spontaneous symmetry breaking. According to statistical physics, among all possible transitions, the most probable are the ones that retain the largest number of symmetries. This explains the currently observed shapes and -- on the qualitative level -- their relative frequency. According to this idea, the most probable first transition is into a planar (pancake) shape, then into …

Translating Discrete Estimates Into A Less Detailed Scale: An Optimal Approach, Thongchai Dumrongpokaphan, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In many practical situations, we use estimates that experts make on a 0-to-n scale. For example, to estimate the quality of a lecturer, we ask each student to evaluate this quality by selecting an integer from 0 to n. Each such estimate may be subjective; so, to increase the estimates' reliability, it is desirable to combine several estimates of the corresponding quality. Sometimes, different estimators use slightly different scales: e.g., one estimator uses a scale from 0 to n+1, and another estimator uses a scale from 0 to n. In such situations, it is desirable to translate these estimates to …

Relativistic Effects Can Be Used To Achieve A Universal Square-Root (Or Even Faster) Computation Speedup, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In this paper, we show that special relativity phenomenon can be used to reduce computation time of any algorithm from T to square root of T. For this purpose, we keep computers where they are, but the whole civilization starts moving around the computer -- at an increasing speed, reaching speeds close to the speed of light. A similar square-root speedup can be achieved if we place ourselves near a growing black hole. Combining the two schemes can lead to an even faster speedup: from time T to the 4-th order root of T.

Secure Multi-Agent Quantum Communication: Towards The Most Efficient Scheme (A Pedagogical Remark), Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In many economic and financial applications, it is important to have secure communications. At present, communication security is provided mostly by RSA coding, but the emergent quantum computing can break this encoding, thus making it not secure. One way to make communications absolutely secure is to use quantum encryption. The existing schemes for quantum encryption are aimed at agent-to-agent communications; however, in practice, we often need secure multi-agent communications, where each of the agents has the ability to securely send messages to everyone else. In principle, we can repeat the agent-to-agent scheme for each pair of agents, but this requires …

Computing With Words -- When Results Do Not Depend On The Selection Of The Membership Function, Christopher W. Tovar, Carlos Cervantes, Mario Delgado, Stephanie Figueroa, Caleb Gillis, Daniel Gomez, Andres Llausas, Julio C. Lopez Molinar, Mariana Rogriguez, Alexander Wieczkowski, Francisco Zapata, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Often, we need to transform natural-language expert knowledge into computer-understandable numerical form. One of the most successful ways to do it is to use fuzzy logic and membership functions. The problem is that membership functions are subjective. It is therefore desirable to look for cases when the results do not depend on this subjective choice. In this paper, after describing a known example of such a situation, we list several other examples where the results do not depend on the subjective choice of a membership function.

How To Build A Patient-Specific Hybrid Simulator For Orthopaedic Open Surgery: Benefits And Limits Of Mixed-Reality Using The Microsoft Hololens, Giuseppe Turini, Sara Condino, Paolo D. Parch, Rosanna M. Viglialoro, Nicola Piolanti, Marco Gesi, Mauro Ferrari, Vincenzo Ferrari

Computer Science Publications

Orthopaedic simulators are popular in innovative surgical training programs, where trainees gain procedural experience in a safe and controlled environment. Recent studies suggest that an ideal simulator should combine haptic, visual, and audio technology to create an immersive training environment. This article explores the potentialities of mixed-reality using the HoloLens to develop a hybrid training system for orthopaedic open surgery. Hip arthroplasty, one of the most common orthopaedic procedures, was chosen as a benchmark to evaluate the proposed system. Patient-specific anatomical 3D models were extracted from a patient computed tomography to implement the virtual content and to fabricate the physical …

Characterization And Effect Of Metal Ions On The Formation Of The Thermus Thermophilus Sco Mixed Disulfide Intermediate, Liezelle C. Lopez, Nikita Mukhitov, Lindsey D. Handley, Cristina S. Hamme, Cristina R. Hofman, Lindsay Euers, Jennifer R. Mckinney, Amani D. Piers, Ellen Wadler, Laura M. Hunsicker-Wang

Chemistry Faculty Research

The Sco protein from Thermus thermophilus has previously been shown to perform a disulfide bond reduction in the Cu_A protein from T. thermophilus, which is a soluble protein engineered from subunit II of cytochrome ba ₃ oxidase that lacks the transmembrane helix. The native cysteines on TtSco and TtCu_A were mutated to serine residues to probe the reactivities of the individual cysteines. Conjugation of TNB to the remaining cysteine in TtCu_A and subsequent release upon incubation with the complementary TtSco protein demonstrated the formation of the mixed disulfide intermediate. The cysteine of …

Safety, Tolerability, And Pharmacokinetics Of Long-Acting Injectable Cabotegravir In Low-Risk Hiv-Uninfected Individuals: Hptn 077, A Phase 2a Randomized Controlled Trial., Raphael J Landovitz, Sue Li, Beatriz Grinsztejn, Halima Dawood, Albert Y Liu, Manya Magnus, Mina C Hosseinipour, Ravindre Panchia, Leslie Cottle, Gordon Chau, Paul Richardson, Mark A Marzinke, Craig W Hendrix, Susan H Eshleman, Yinfeng Zhang, Elizabeth Tolley, Jeremy Sugarman, Ryan Kofron, Adeola Adeyeye, David Burns, Alex R Rinehart, David Margolis, William R Spreen, Myron S Cohen, Marybeth Mccauley, Joseph J Eron

Epidemiology Faculty Publications

BACKGROUND: Cabotegravir (CAB) is a novel strand-transfer integrase inhibitor being developed for HIV treatment and prevention. CAB is formulated both as an immediate-release oral tablet for daily administration and as a long-acting injectable suspension (long-acting CAB [CAB LA]) for intramuscular (IM) administration, which delivers prolonged plasma exposure to the drug after IM injection. HIV Prevention Trials Network study 077 (HPTN 077) evaluated the safety, tolerability, and pharmacokinetics of CAB LA in HIV-uninfected males and females at 8 sites in Brazil, Malawi, South Africa, and the United States.

METHODS AND FINDINGS: HPTN 077 was a double-blind, placebo-controlled phase 2a trial. Healthy …

Bhutan Landscape Anomaly: Possible Effect On Himalayan Economy (In View Of Optimal Description Of Elevation Profiles), Thach N. Nguyen, Laxman Bokati, Aaron A. Velasco, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Economies of countries located in seismic zones are strongly effected by this seismicity. If we underestimate the seismic activity, then a reasonably routine earthquake can severely damage the existing structures and thus, lead to huge economic losses. On the other hand, if we overestimate the seismic activity, we waste a lot of resources on unnecessarily fortifying all the buildings -- and this too harms the economies. From this viewpoint, it is desirable to have estimations of regional seismic activities which are as accurate as possible. Current predictions are mostly based on the standard geophysical understanding of earthquakes as being largely …

Dynamical Constraints On The Hr 8799 Planets With Gpi, Jason J. Wang, James R. Graham, Rebekah Dawson, Daniel Fabrycky, Robert J. De Rosa, Laurent Pueyo, Quinn Konopacky, Bruce Macintosh, Christian Marois, Eugene Chiang, S. Mark Ammons, Pauline Arriaga, Vanessa P. Bailey, Travis Barman, Joanna Bulger, Jeffrey Chilcote, Tara Cotten, Rene Doyon, Gaspard Duchêne, Thomas M. Esposito, Michael P. Fitzgerald, Katherine B. Follette, Benjamin L. Gerard, Stephen J. Goodsell, Alexandra Z. Greenbaum, Pascale Hibon, Li Wei Hung, Patrick Ingraham, Paul Kalas, James E. Larkin, Jérôme Maire, Franck Marchis, Kimberly Ward-Duong

Astronomy: Faculty Publications

The HR 8799 system uniquely harbors four young super-Jupiters whose orbits can provide insights into the system's dynamical history and constrain the masses of the planets themselves. Using the Gemini Planet Imager, we obtained down to one milliarcsecond precision on the astrometry of these planets. We assessed four-planet orbit models with different levels of constraints and found that assuming the planets are near 1:2:4:8 period commensurabilities, or are coplanar, does not worsen the fit. We added the prior that the planets must have been stable for the age of the system (40 Myr) by running orbit configurations from our posteriors …

Sequestration Effect On The Open-Cyclic Switchable Property Of Warfarin Induce By Cyclodextrin: Time-Resolved Fluorescence Study., Naji Saleh Ahmed Al-Dubaili.

Chemistry Theses

In this work, the photophysical properties of the fluorescent anticoagulant drug warfarin (W) were examined in water and inside methyl- β-cyclodextrins (Me- β-CD) through absorption and time-resolved fluorescence measurements at pH 3 and 9 and upon the selective excitation of different isomers of warfarin at 280 and 320 nm. The values of binding constants (2.9 x 10³ M^-1 and 4.2 x 10² M^-1 for protonated and deprotonated forms, respectively) were extracted from the spectrophotometric data. Both absorption and time-resolved fluorescence results established that the interior of the macromolecular host binds preferentially the open pronated form, redshifts …

Water Security For Texas: A Post-Secondary Education Pathway For The Water Workforce, Rudolph A. Rosen, Luis A. Cifuentes, James Fischer, Howard Marquise, John C. Tracey

Water Resources Science and Technology Faculty Publications

Water and wastewater industry leaders in Texas and throughout the United States have expressed concern over high rates of retirement eligibility and difficulties finding and attracting workers ready to fill job openings, especially for work in smaller systems. In late January 2018, the U.S. Government Accountability Office released a report on water workforce readiness and a bill was introduced in the U.S. Senate to establish a water infrastructure workforce development program. Concern over existing education of workers in water and demographic information projecting future workforce readiness are commonly cited as signaling a coming crisis for the water industry. An alignment …

Ensuring Compliance From 35,000 Feet: Accountability And Trade-Offs In Aviation Safety Regulatory Networks, Russell W. Mills, Christopher J. Koliba, Dorit Rubinstein Reiss

College of Agriculture and Life Sciences Faculty Publications

A puzzle that faces public administrators within regulatory networks is how to balance the need for public or democratic accountability with increasing demands from interest groups and elected officials to utilize the expertise of the private sector in developing process-oriented programs that ensure compliance. This article builds upon the network governance accountability framework developed by Koliba, Mills, and Zia to explore the dominant accountability frames and the accountability trade-offs that shape the process-oriented regulatory regime used by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to oversee and regulate air carriers in the United States.

Resistive Mhd Evolution Of Shaped Rfp Equilibria, Joe Newman, Andrew S. Ware, Nimrod Team, University Of Montana, Missoula

UM Plasma Group Publications

Computational modeling of the resistive MHD evolution of reverse-field-pinch (RFP) plasmas with boundary shaping is undertaken. The VMEC code obtains equilibria that are similar to quasi-single helicity (QSH) states in an RFP with a helical axis and a symmetric boundary [J.D. Hanson, et al., Nuclear Fusion 53, 083016 (2013)]. Previous work has shown that axisymmetric boundary shaping affects whether an axisymmetric or QSH equilibrium is obtained in VMEC and it affects the extent of the swing of the helical axis in the QSH state. In this work, these equilibria are used as initial conditions for the NIMROD code [C.R. …

Modeling Association In Microbial Communities With Clique Loginear Models, Adrian Dobra, Camilo Valdes, Dragana Ajdic, Bertrand S. Clarke, Jennifer Clarke

Department of Mathematics: Faculty Publications

There is a growing awareness of the important roles that microbial communities play in complex biological processes. Modern investigation of these often uses next generation sequencing of metagenomic samples to determine community composition. We propose a statistical technique based on clique loglinear models and Bayes model averaging to identify microbial components in a metagenomic sample at various taxonomic levels that have significant associations. We describe the model class, a stochastic search technique for model selection, and the calculation of estimates of posterior probabilities of interest. We demonstrate our approach using data from the Human Microbiome Project and from a study …

Evaluation Of Three Forest-Based Bioenergy Development Strategies In The Inland Northwest, United States, Jill Moroney

Human-Environment Systems Research Center Faculty Publications and Presentations

In this article, we compare three bioenergy scenarios that use woody biomass from US Inland Northwest forests. The scenarios are based on current bioenergy research, development efforts, and stakeholder input. They include a small-scale system that produces drop-in transportation biofuel and biochar, a large, regional system that produces bio-aviation fuel, and a midsized pellet production system. We modeled woody biomass harvest, processing, and transportation, and then evaluated profitability and potential socioeconomic impacts to determine the overall viability of each strategy. Through interviews, we found widespread stakeholder support for all three scenarios. Wood-pellet production was profitable and feasible with current prices …

Trends In Obesity And Multimorbidity In Canada., Michael Lebenbaum, Gregory S Zaric, Amardeep Thind, Sisira Sarma

Epidemiology and Biostatistics Publications

Very few studies have examined trends in multimorbidity over time and even fewer have examined trends over time across different body mass index (BMI) groups. Given a general decline in death rates but increased cardiovascular risk factors among individuals with obesity, the trend in the association between obesity and multimorbidity is hypothesized to be increasing over time. The data for our study came from the 1996-97 National Population Health Survey and the 2005 and 2012-13 Canadian Community Health Surveys (N = 277,366 across all 3 surveys). We examined trends in the association between BMI groups and multimorbidity using a logistic …

Cross-Border Interbank Payments And Settlements: Emerging Opportunities For Digital Transformation, Yi Meng Lau, Et Al

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The report “Cross-Border Interbank Payments and Settlements” is a cross-jurisdictional industry collaboration between Canada, Singapore and the United Kingdom to examine the existing challenges and frictions that arise when undertaking crossborder payments. This report explores proposals for new and more efficient models for processing cross-border transactions.

Short-Term Wind Speed Forecasting Via Stacked Extreme Learning Machine With Generalized Correntropy, Xiong Luo, Jiankun Sun, Long Wang, Weiping Wang, Wenbing Zhao, Jinsong Wu, Jenq-Haur Wang, Zijun Zhang

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Recently, wind speed forecasting as an effective computing technique plays an important role in advancing industry informatics, while dealing with these issues of control and operation for renewable power systems. However, it is facing some increasing difficulties to handle the large-scale dataset generated in these forecasting applications, with the purpose of ensuring stable computing performance. In response to such limitation, this paper proposes a more practical approach through the combination of extreme-learning machine (ELM) method and deep-learning model. ELM is a novel computing paradigm that enables the neural network (NN) based learning to be achieved with fast training speed and …

An Interpretable Neural Fuzzy Inference System For Predictions Of Underpricing In Initial Public Offerings, Di Wang, Xiaolin Qian, Chai Quek, Ah-Hwee Tan, Chunyan Miao, Xiaofeng Zhang, Geok See Ng, You Zhou

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Due to their aptitude in both accurate data processing and human comprehensible reasoning, neural fuzzy inference systems have been widely adopted in various application domains as decision support systems. Especially in real-world scenarios such as decision making in financial transactions, the human experts may be more interested in knowing the comprehensive reasons of certain advices provided by a decision support system in addition to how confident the system is on such advices. In this paper, we apply an integrated autonomous computational model termed genetic algorithm and rough set incorporated neural fuzzy inference system (GARSINFIS) to predict underpricing in initial public …

Writing And Designing A Chapter On Mercury And Pluto For The Textbook Exploring The Planets (Explanet.Info), Braxton Clark Spilker

Theses and Dissertations

Exploring the Planets (http://explanet.info) is a free online college textbook covering thebasic concepts of planetary science emphasizing the character and evolution of the planetarybodies in the Solar System. The latest edition (3rd edition) was published online in 2007 by EricH Christiansen. Since the release of the third edition, two important planetary missions havebeen completed: MESSENGER (to Mercury) and New Horizons (to Pluto). These missionsprovided new information and fundamental insights into these planetary bodies, which have notyet been included in Exploring the Planets. The modern results based on recent investigations ofMercury and Pluto are critical for our understanding of the nature …