Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Wildlife In Parks And Communities: Institutionalizing Wildlife Conservation In Park Systems Through Municipal-Wide Planning Efforts, John J. Pipoly Iii, Lajuan Tucker, Patrick Fitzgerald, Scott Gilmore

Marine & Environmental Sciences Faculty Proceedings, Presentations, Speeches, Lectures

Wildlife populations are declining in the United States. As development increases, local parks and natural areas often become safe-havens for wildlife, including birds, pollinators and small mammals. Creeks, rights-of-way, roadsides and even private, commercial and public landscapes can create corridors for wildlife in urban and suburban areas, helping wildlife survive and minimizing human-wildlife conflicts. While many park departments and municipalities have some nature or wildlife programs at nature centers and public parks or manage some properties as natural areas, most do not integrate best practices for managing wildlife into park and recreation master plans or municipalwide sustainability, green infrastructure or …

A Note On Multilevel Toeplitz Matrices, Lei Cao, Selcuk Koyuncu

Mathematics Faculty Articles

Chien, Liu, Nakazato and Tam proved that all n × n classical Toeplitz matrices (one-level Toeplitz matrices) are unitarily similar to complex symmetric matrices via two types of unitary matrices and the type of the unitary matrices only depends on the parity of n. In this paper we extend their result to multilevel Toeplitz matrices that any multilevel Toeplitz matrix is unitarily similar to a complex symmetric matrix. We provide a method to construct the unitary matrices that uniformly turn any multilevel Toeplitz matrix to a complex symmetric matrix by taking tensor products of these two types of unitary …

A Toolkit For Managing The Ee (Environmental Education) And Esd (Education For Sustainable Development) Continuum, Attiyya Atkins, John J. Pipoly Iii

Marine & Environmental Sciences Faculty Proceedings, Presentations, Speeches, Lectures

Environmental Education (EE) and Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) represent extremes of a global continuum. EE stresses awareness of process about, from and for the environment (Vrasidas 2007). ESD is defined as education empowering communities to acquire best management practices engendering human, social, economic and natural sustainability (UNESCO 2012) and developing their resilience despite environmental changes (Fastenrath et al. 2019). ESD is a critical component of the UN's Sustainable Development Goals (UN 2012), which grew from the Millennium Development Goals (UN 2000). Each park agency should develop research-based educational programs that address both EE and ESD. The ESD must promote …

A Comparison Of Three Types Of Permeable Pavements For Urban Runoff Mitigation In The Semi-Arid South Texas, U.S.A, Taufiqul Alam, Ahmed Mahmoud, Kim D. Jones, Juan Cesar Bezares-Cruz, Javier Guerrero

Civil Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

This study examines the hydrologic and environmental performance of three types of permeable pavement designs: Porous Concrete Pavement (PCP), Permeable Interlocking Concrete (PICP), and Interlocking Block Pavement with Gravel (IBPG) in the semi-arid South Texas. Outflow rate, storage, Normalized Volume Reduction (NVR), Normalized Load Reductions (NLR) of Total Suspended Solids (TSS), and Biochemical Oxygen Demand (BOD₅) were compared to results obtained from adjacent traditional pavements at different regional parking lots. A notable percentage of peak flow attenuation of approximately 31–100% was observed when permeable pavements were constructed and implemented. IBPG was capable to hold runoff from rainfall depths …

Understanding The Importance Of Graduate Admissions Criteria According To Prospective Graduate Students, Deepa Chari, Geoff Potvin

Department of Physics

Understanding perceptions of graduate admissions from multiple stakeholders can cultivate an improved understanding about the process of graduate induction, the role that admissions plays in restricting diversity in physics, and contribute to more informed practices for all involved. Prior studies in graduate admissions have reported on how certain admission criteria weigh in the consideration of applicants primarily from faculty perspectives. Motivated by the concept of multivocal knowledge, in this article, we report on prospective students’ perspectives of the importance of the same admission criteria—a stakeholder group that is critical but underempowered in the admissions process. We identify a substantial agreement …

Aerobic C-C And C-O Bond Formation Reactions Mediated By High-Valent Nickel Species., Sofia Smith, Oriol Planas, Laura Gómez, Nigam Rath, Xavi Ribas, Liviu Mirica, Liviu Mirica

Chemistry & Biochemistry Faculty Works

Nickel complexes have been widely employed as catalysts in C–C and C–heteroatom bond formation reactions. While Ni(0), Ni(I), and Ni(II) intermediates are most relevant in these transformations, recently Ni(III) and Ni(IV) species have also been proposed to play a role in catalysis. Reported herein is the synthesis, detailed characterization, and reactivity of a series of Ni(II) and Ni(III) metallacycle complexes stabilized by tetradentate pyridinophane ligands with various N-substituents. Interestingly, while the oxidation of the Ni(II) complexes with various other oxidants led to exclusive C–C bond formation in very good yields, the use of O2 or H2O2 as oxidants led to …

Coccidioidomycosis: Medical And Spatio-Temporal Perspectives, Nikias Sarafoglou, Rafael Laniado-Laborin, Menas Kafatos

Mathematics, Physics, and Computer Science Faculty Articles and Research

Coccidioidomycosis (CM) is a disease of major public health importance due to the challenges in its diagnosis and treatment. To understand CM requires the attributes of a multidisciplinary network analysis to appreciate the complexity of the medical, the environmental and the social issues involved: public health, public policy, geology, atmospheric science, agronomy, social sciences and finally humanities, all which provide insight into this population transformation.

In section 1 of this paper, we describe the CM-epidemiology, the clinical features, the diagnosis and finally the treatment.

In section 2, we highlight the most important contributions and controversies in the history of the …

The Supreme Court’S Recent “Takings” Cases: The Koontz And Arkansas Decisions -- What Do They Mean For Local Government?, Lynda L. Butler

Lynda L. Butler

No abstract provided.

Book Review Of Eco-Pragmatism: Making Sensible Environmental Decisions In An Uncertain World, Lynda L. Butler

Lynda L. Butler

No abstract provided.

Coastal Marine Science For Law And Business Students: Preparing Law And Business Professionals To Make "Informed Decisions" About Coastal Issues, David H. Niebuhr, Lynda L. Butler, Don Rahtz, Britt E. Anderson, April N. Lawrence

Lynda L. Butler

The rigors of employment-directed undergraduate education. and decreased emphasis on "Liberal Arts" studies occurring at some colleges and universities has left many graduates with a level of scientific understanding which is inadequate to make infonned choices about issues which effect the environment. To address this lack of scientific understanding. the Chesapeake Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve (Virginia) and the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, with the Marshall-Wythe School of Law and the School of Business Administration of the College of William and Mary are developing a Coastal Ecosystem Science Program to teach future law and business professionals the basics of …

Introduction/Welcome/Announcements, Kathryn Rowe, Davison M. Douglas, Elizabeth Armistead Andrews

Elizabeth Armistead Andrews

No abstract provided.

Initial Field Testing Results From Building-Integrated Solar Energy Harvesting Windows Installation In Perth, Australia, Mikhail Vasiliev, Mohammad Nur-E-Alam, Kamal Alameh

Mikhail Vasiliev

Vertical Ionization Energies From The Average Local Electron Energy Function, Amer Marwan El-Samman

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

It is a non-intuitive but well-established fact that the first and higher vertical ionization energies (VIE) of any N-electron system are encoded in the system's ground-state electronic wave function. This makes it possible to compute VIEs of any atom or molecule from its ground-state wave function directly, without performing calculations on the (N-1)-electron states. In practice, VIEs can be extracted from the wave function by using the (extended) Koopmans' theorem or by taking the asymptotic limit of certain wave-function-based quantities such as the ratio of kinetic energy density to the electron density. However, when the wave function is expanded in …

Melpf Version 1: Modeling Error Learning Based Post-Processor Framework For Hydrologic Models Accuracy Improvement, Rui Wu, Lei Yang, Chao Chen, Sajjad Ahmad, Sergiu M. Dascalu, Frederick C. Harris Jr.

Geosciences Faculty Publications and Presentations

This paper studies how to improve the accuracy of hydrologic models using machine-learning models as post-processors and presents possibilities to reduce the workload to create an accurate hydrologic model by removing the calibration step. It is often challenging to develop an accurate hydrologic model due to the time-consuming model calibration procedure and the nonstationarity of hydrologic data. Our findings show that the errors of hydrologic models are correlated with model inputs. Thus motivated, we propose a modeling-error-learning-based post-processor framework by leveraging this correlation to improve the accuracy of a hydrologic model. The key idea is to predict the differences (errors) …

Solution Of Simultaneous Chemical Equilibria In Heterogeneous Systems: Implementation In Matlab, D. Scott Smith

Chemistry Faculty Publications

A Matlab script to solve simultaneous equilibria in solution, including precipitation/dissolution equilibria is described.

On Three Possible Applications Of Neutrosophic Logic In Applied Sciences, Including Matter Creation, Victor Christianto, Robert N. Boyd, Florentin Smarandache

Branch Mathematics and Statistics Faculty and Staff Publications

In the same spirit with the theme of last issue of this SGJ journal (“Ongoing creation”), this paper shortly reviews a plausible mechanism from Aether to become ordinary matter from the perspective of Neutrosophic Logic. We also discuss two other possible applications of Neutrosophic Logic, including a resolution of conflicting paradigms in medicine. We hope that some ideas as outlined herein will be proved useful in the near future.

Why Does This Entity Matter? Support Passage Retrieval For Entity Retrieval, Shubham Chatterjee, Laura Dietz

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

Our goal is to complement an entity ranking with human-readable explanations of how those retrieved entities are connected to the information need. While related to the problem of support passage retrieval, in this paper, we explore two underutilized indicators of relevance: contextual entities and entity salience. The effectiveness of the indicators is studied within a supervised learning-to-rank framework on a dataset from TREC Complex Answer Retrieval. We find that salience is a useful indicator, but it is often not applicable. In contrast, although performance improvements are obtained by using contextual entities, using contextual words still outperforms contextual entities.

Phishing: Message Appraisal And The Exploration Of Fear And Self-Confidence, Deanna House, M. K. Raja

Information Systems and Quantitative Analysis Faculty Publications

Phishing attacks have threatened the security of both home users and organizations in recent years. Phishing uses social engineering to fraudulently obtain information that is confidential or sensitive. Individuals are targeted to take action by clicking on a link and providing information. This research explores fear arousal and self-confidence in subjects confronted by phishing attacks. The study collected data from multiple sources (including an attempted phishing attack). The survey results indicated that when individuals had a high level of fear arousal related to providing login credentials they had a decreased intention to respond to a phishing attack. Self-confidence did not …

Search For A Light Charged Higgs Boson Decaying To A W Boson And A Cp-Odd Higgs Boson In Final States With Eμμ Or Μμμ In Proton-Proton Collisions At √S =13 Tev, A. M. Sirunyan

Department of Physics and Astronomy: Faculty Publications

A search for a light charged Higgs boson (H⁺) decaying to a W boson and a CP-odd Higgs boson (A) in final states with eμμ or μμμ is performed using data from pp collisions at √s = 13 TeV, recorded by the CMS detector at the LHC and corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 35.9 fb⁻¹. In this search, it is assumed that the H⁺ boson is produced in decays of top quarks, and the A boson decays to two oppositely charged muons. The presence of signals for H⁺ boson masses …

Generating Electromagnetic Schell-Model Sources Using Complex Screens With Spatially Varying Auto- And Cross-Correlation Functions, Milo W. Hyde Iv

Faculty Publications

We present a method to generate any physically realizable electromagnetic Schell-model source. Our technique can be directly implemented on existing vector-beam generators that utilize spatial light modulators for coherence control, beam shaping, and relative phasing. This work significantly extends published research on the subject, where control over the partially coherent source’s cross-spectral density matrix was limited. We begin by presenting the statistical optics theory necessary to derive and implement our method. We then apply our technique, both analytically and in simulation, to produce two electromagnetic Schell-model sources from the literature. We demonstrate control over the full cross-spectral density matrices of …

Abiotic And Biotic Limitations To Nodulation By Leguminous Cover Crops In South Texas, Stephanie Kasper, Bradley O. Christoffersen, Pushpa Soti, Alexis Racelis

School of Earth, Environmental, and Marine Sciences Faculty Publications and Presentations

Many farms use leguminous cover crops as a nutrient management strategy to reduce their need for nitrogen fertilizer. When they are effective, leguminous cover crops are a valuable tool for sustainable nutrient management. However, the symbiotic partnership between legumes and nitrogen fixing rhizobia is vulnerable to several abiotic and biotic stressors that reduce nitrogen fixation efficiency in real world contexts. Sometimes, despite inoculation with rhizobial strains, this symbiosis fails to form. Such failure was observed in a 14-acre winter cover crop trial in the Rio Grande Valley (RGV) of Texas when three legume species produced no signs of nodulation or …

Cryptic Diversity Of A Widespread Global Pathogen Reveals Expanded Threats To Amphibian Conservation, Allison Q. Byrne, Vance T. Vredenburg, An Martel, Frank Pasmans, Rayna C. Bell, David C. Blackburn, Alessandro Catenazzi

Department of Biological Sciences

Biodiversity loss is one major outcome of human-mediated ecosystem disturbance. One way that humans have triggered wildlife declines is by transporting disease-causing agents to remote areas of the world. Amphibians have been hit particularly hard by disease due in part to a globally distributed pathogenic chytrid fungus (Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis [Bd]). Prior research has revealed important insights into the biology and distribution of Bd; however, there are still many outstanding questions in this system. Although we know that there are multiple divergent lineages of Bd that differ in pathogenicity, we know little about how these lineages are …

The Radial Distribution Of Dust Particles In The Hl Tau Disk From Alma And Vla Observations, Carlos Carrasco-Gonzalez, Anibal Sierra, Mario Flock, Zhaohuan Zhu, Thomas Henning, Claire Chandler, Roberto Galvan-Madrid, Enrique Macias, Guillem Anglada, Hendrik Linz, Mayra Osorio, Luis F. Rodriguez, Leonardo Testi, Jose M. Torrelles, Laura Perez, Yao Liu

Physics & Astronomy Faculty Research

Understanding planet formation requires one to discern how dust grows in protoplanetary disks. An important parameter to measure in disks is the maximum dust grain size present. This is usually estimated through measurements of the dust opacity at different millimeter wavelengths assuming optically thin emission and dust opacity dominated by absorption. However, Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) observations have shown that these assumptions might not be correct in the case of protoplanetary disks, leading to overestimation of particle sizes and to underestimation of the disk's mass. Here, we present an analysis of high-quality ALMA and Very Large Array images of …

Utilizing Dplot, Sedlog, And Arcgis Pro To Enhance Geologic Field Skills: Rosendale, Ulster County New York, Malek Shami, Nazrul I. Khandaker, Stanley Schleifer, Zarine Ali, Leonardo Sanchez, Gugu Ginindza, Tyn Tyn Nai

Publications and Research

Capstone geologic field mapping courses in undergraduate geoscience programs aim to compliment the academic knowledge with technical field skills. As a pilot study, these tools were used to collect field data using folded lower Paleozoic to mid-Paleozoic sedimentary outcrops consisting of clastic, non-clastic and occasional mixed siliciclastics in Rosendale, Ulster County, New York. Rosendale is known for its classic geological outcrops with variable structural, stratigraphic, paleontological and sedimentological complexities – ideal for a field mapping course. Traditionally, students’ data acquisition in the field and its subsequent laboratory analysis to produce a final geologic field report utilized acetate overlays to produce …

Closed-Form Probability Distribution Of Number Of Infections At A Given Time In A Stochastic Sis Epidemic Model.Pdf, Michael Otunuga

Olusegun Michael Otunuga

Genetic Variation Of The Dgat1 Gene In Dual-Purpose Dairy Cows And Its Influence On Economically Important Breeding Traits, Mark E. Armitage, Emma Swan, Denise O'Meara

SURE Journal: Science Undergraduate Research Experience Journal

Background
Over the last 10 years, the discovery of individual, or candidate, genes that influence economically important traits has revolutionised how the dairy industry selects cows for breeding programmes. One such gene, the diacylglycerol O-acyltransferase 1 (DGAT1) gene is significant in dairy production as it is associated with the synthesis of fat in milk, and polymorphisms within the gene can be used for selection purposes. In this study, the variants (genotypes) of the K232A polymorphism of the DGAT1 gene, within a dual-purpose dairy herd, bred for both dairy and beef production, were determined, and compared to the Economic …

Derivation Of Direct Explicit Integrators Of Rk Type For Solving Class Of Seventh-Order Ordinary Differential Equations, Mohammed S. Mechee, Jawad K. Mshachal

Karbala International Journal of Modern Science

The main contribution of this work is the development of direct explicit methods of Runge-Kutta (RK) type for solving class of seventh-order ordinary differential equations (ODEs) to improve computational efficiency. For this purpose, we have generalized RK, RKN, RKD, RKT, RKFD and RKM methods for solving class of first-, second-, third-, fourth-, and fifth-order ODEs. Using Taylor expansion approach, we have derived the algebraic equations of the order conditions for the proposed RKM integrators up to the tenth-order. Based on these order conditions, two RKM methods of fifth- and sixth-order with four- and five-stage are derived. The zero stability of …

Age-Invariant Face Recognition Using Trigonometric Central Features, Ahmad Malek Bilal, Mohamad-Bassam Kurdy Ph.D

Karbala International Journal of Modern Science

Many facial recognition systems must fail because of many influences such as lighting, changes in composition, expression and aging in the face. But the effects of facial aging are the main problem that many algorithms face with precision. Accordingly, this work provides a model based on the extraction of a number of trigonometric features. The proposed model includes three areas connecting and surrounding the main facial features. In addition, aging is recognized by calculating the trigonometric zones extracted. The system compares the query face with the database. Then, the query image is extracted from the original face image. Next, the …

Properties Of Concrete Modified With Ultra-Fine Slag, Panga Narasimha Reddy, Javed Ahmed Naqash

Karbala International Journal of Modern Science

The supplementary cementitious materials (SCM) can be used as a replacement of cement in the construction industry to minimize the drawbacks of normal concrete such as the emission of carbon dioxide so as to be eco-friendly. This paper presents the effect of ultra-fine slag (i.e. 25% of alccofine) as a replacement of cement for different water to binder ratios (i.e. 0.38, 0.4 and 0.45). The effect of alccofine on the concrete strength properties were studied at 7 and 28 days wherein considerable strength enhancement was observed compared to normal concrete. Thermogravimetric analysis was also carried out in which mass loss …

Electrical Properties Of Copper Iodine Prepared By Exploding Wire, Sawsan Hussein Abdullah, Mohammed Oudah Salman Dr, Hammad Raheem Humud Dr

Karbala International Journal of Modern Science

Copper iodide (CuI) is one of the promising materials for use in many applications such as organic electronic devices. In this work, CuI nanoparticles were prepared using the exploding wire technique in an iodine solution and were deposited as thin films by a spin coating method to study its electrical properties. This study showed that all prepared thin films were a poly-crystalline structure with γ phase. The electrical study showed that al film was p-type. The dielectric parameters depended on frequency and voltage. It can be noticed a small increase in ac conductivity by increasing the applied voltages in the …