Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Electrifying Encinitas, Gabriella Medina, Darbi Berry

San Diego Regional Climate Collaborative

Advancing the San Diego region’s resilience to climate change impacts within the nexus of social, environmental, and economic prosperity is a top priority for local planning and efforts. As the region continues to face impacts on quality of life from climate change, the City of Encinitas is taking action to respond by leading efforts of energy resilience with their recently passed Green Building Ordinance (Ordinance). The Ordinance requires all new residential and non-residential buildings constructed in Encinitas to be “all-electric” unless an exception applies. As the San Diego region moves towards decarbonizing, Encinitas is the first city to mandate building …

Understanding The Inflation Reduction Act, Michelle Robidas, Darbi Berry

San Diego Regional Climate Collaborative

In this blog, readers will learn what the Inflation Reduction Act is, the major categories of its climate funding, and why its passing into law was a historical moment for the U.S.

Revolutionizing The Integration Of Sustainability & Zero Net Energy In The San Diego Region, Gabriella Medina, Darbi Berry

San Diego Regional Climate Collaborative

The San Diego County Regional Airport Airport Authority (Airport Authority) manages the day-to-day operations of the San Diego International Airport (SAN) and addresses the region’s long-term air transportation needs. SAN is also the busiest single-run commercial airport in the United States. To lessen SAN’s greenhouse gas emissions impact on local climate change vulnerabilities from the airport’s operations (i.e. minimizing energy usage), the Airport Authority has integrated sustainability across its social, environmental, and economic functions. In their commitment to sustainability, the Airport Authority is using the New Terminal 1 (New T1) project and zero-net energy (ZNE) Airline Support Facilities (ASF) as …

Mathematics For Liberal Arts (Ma301), Lecture Notes, Lyubomir I. Boyadzhiev

Open Educational Resources

These lecture notes are designed to provide the students majoring in the liberal arts with an understanding and appreciation of mathematics as a lively, interesting, and surprisingly rich human activity with many fascinating applications. The text, emphasizing strongly intuitive thinking and visualization, is a collection of topics chosen to show the open-minded readers that:

• The connection between the mathematics presented in the course and down-to-earth, concrete real-life problems is transparent and immediate.
• Modern mathematical discoveries do not have to be the exclusive province of professional mathematicians.
• There is an important aesthetic component in mathematics, and just as in art and …

Testing Effects Of Lorentz Invariance Violation In The Propagation Of Astroparticles With The Pierre Auger Observatory, P. Abreu, M. Aglietta, J. M. Albury, I. Allekotte, K. Almeida Cheminant

Faculty Publications

Lorentz invariance violation (LIV) is often described by dispersion relations of the form E-i(2) = m(i)(2) + p(i)(2) + delta E-i,n(2+ n) with delta different based on particle type i, with energy E, momentum p and rest mass m. Kinematics and energy thresholds of interactions are modified once the LIV terms become comparable to the squared masses of the particles involved. Thus, the strongest constraints on the LIV coefficients delta(i,n) tend to come from the highest energies. At sufficiently high energies, photons produced by cosmic ray interactions as they propagate through the Universe could be subluminal and unattenuated over cosmological …

2022 Hampton Roads Station Tide Prediction Calendars, Virginia Institute Of Marine Science

Miscellaneous

No abstract provided.

Investigating Synthetic Methods For Tio2-Nayf4 Hybrid Nanocrystals, Nurul Muttakin

Dissertations and Theses

The capacity to develop and expand the utility of a single nanostructure is one of the major issues in the field of hybrid nanocrystals. Major advancements in the fabrication of materials with multiple functionalities by combining many materials into a single nanoparticle entity are intriguing, but they still pose obstacles that must be addressed. This trend has been spurred by significant progressions in the wet-chemical synthesis of durable and easily programmable nanocrystals with various morphologies. The extent of the structural complexity of solution-based nanocrystals looks to be one of the inevitable avenues along which nanoscience will increasingly focus. We have …

Co-Producing A Shared Characterization Of Depredation In The Gulf Of Mexico Reef Fish Fishery: Comprehensive Report, James M. Drymon, Ana Osowski, Amanda Jargowsky, Matthew Ajemian, Angela Collins, Bryan Fluech, Steven Gray, Julie Lively, Steven Scyphers

Coastal Research and Extension Center Publications

Depredation, defined as the partial or complete removal of a hooked fish by a non-target species, is a cryptic form of mortality that can affect the accuracy of stock assessments and species management efforts. Accounting for depredation is crucial to minimize uncertainty in stock assessment models and to obtain accurate and reliable fisheries catch data. If these interactions are frequent, failure to properly quantify this form of mortality can lead to the underestimation of reef fish population removals, inappropriate harvest recommendations, and stakeholder unrest. In recent years, depredation has escalated in the Gulf of Mexico (GoM) reef fish fishery. Although …

Fidget Spinner Generator System For Mi-Star Unit 7.1, Douglas Oppliger

Mi-STAR

This simple system is an integral and important part of this unit. It allows students to see, feel, and experience how kinetic energy can be transformed to another kind of energy. It is an effective learning tool in the unit because it is reasonably easy to make, has just a few simple and visible components, and reliably transforms enough energy to light an LED (light emitting diode). The LED provides a satisfying light output which is easy to observe.

Building An Understanding Of Human Activities In First Person Video Using Fuzzy Inference, Bradley A. Schneider

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Activities of Daily Living (ADL’s) are the activities that people perform every day in their home as part of their typical routine. The in-home, automated monitoring of ADL’s has broad utility for intelligent systems that enable independent living for the elderly and mentally or physically disabled individuals. With rising interest in electronic health (e-Health) and mobile health (m-Health) technology, opportunities abound for the integration of activity monitoring systems into these newer forms of healthcare. In this dissertation we propose a novel system for describing ’s based on video collected from a wearable camera. Most in-home activities are naturally defined by …

Error Handling Approaches In Programming Languages, Joey Aldrin Rees-Hill

Honors Papers

Error handling is a part of nearly every computer program, but it is rarely the main focus of a program's developers. Nevertheless, correct error handling is important because it can enable a program to recover from abnormal circumstances and continue to function and serve its purpose. Programming languages offer a variety of tools and approaches for programs to detect and handle errors. I investigated the different approaches to error handling in contemporary programming languages. I found three general paradigms of error handling approaches. One paradigm was Special Return Value, in which certain return values of a function signify that an …

Using Network Analysis To Contrast Three Models Of Student Forum Discussions, Hannah N. Benston

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

There is much research about how actors and events in social networks affect each other. In this research, three network models were created for discussion forums in three semesters of undergraduate general physics courses. This study seeks to understand what social network measures are most telling of a online forum classroom dynamic. That is, I wanted to understand more about things like what students are most central to the networks and whether this is consistent across different network models. I also wanted to better understand how students may or may not group together. What relationships (student to student, student to …

Harmful Algal Blooms In Caesar Creek Lake And Their Relationship To Riparian Cover, Morgan C. Grunden

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Caesar Creek Lake (CCL) in Warren County, OH has recently been experiencing harmful algal blooms (HABs) which are most likely attributed to an excess of phosphorus (P) from fertilizers and manures applied to surrounding fields. Sediments act as a sink for P later supplying a source of P in lakes for HABs when waters become thermally stratified and anoxic. This study seeks to determine the relationship between HABs in CCL and riparian cover at the main tributaries, Anderson Fork and Caesar Creek. In order to do this, sediment samples were collected from four sample sites along Anderson Fork and three …

Recent Advances Toward Transparent Methane Emissions Monitoring: A Review, Broghan M. Erland, Andrew K. Thorpe, John Gamon

Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences: Faculty Publications

Given that anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions must be immediately reduced to avoid drastic increases in global temperature, methane emissions have been placed center stage in the fight against climate change. Methane has a significantly larger warming potential than carbon dioxide. A large percentage of methane emissions are in the form of industry emissions, some of which can now be readily identified and mitigated. This review considers recent advances in methane detection that allow accurate and transparent monitoring, which are needed for reducing uncertainty in source attribution and evaluating progress in emissions reductions. A particular focus is on complementary methods …

Saving, Investment, And Capital Markets In Developing Countries: A Look At Nepal And Tanzania, Aayush Aryal

CISLA Senior Integrative Projects

No abstract provided.

The Chemical Characterization Of Microplastic Polymer Composition From Various Littoral Environments On Cape Cod, Massachusetts, Leah Kosovsky

Chemistry Honors Papers

The increasing abundance of microplastic pollution in marine environments is a rising concern, and it has the potential to negatively affect the health and sustainability of marine organisms and ecosystems. Microplastics can harm organisms through a variety of chemical, biological, and physical mechanisms. The extent to which they are harmful varies greatly and is significantly dependent on the chemical and physical makeup of the plastic polymer. Due to this variability, it is important to characterize microplastic samples in various environments to better understand the risks associated with the debris in certain areas. Through field research, a spatial analysis of the …

Investigating The Impacts Of Microgravity On Methanotrophic Bacteria Metabolism For Methane Gas Oxidation, Daisy Li, Elena Zhu, Stella Ristic '25, Joshua Suarez

Distinguished Student Work

An abundance of waste methane gas is produced on the International Space Station (ISS) as a result of the Sabatier Reaction, a part of the Environmental Control and Life Support System (ECLSS). In order to manage this organic waste, this experiment seeks to understand how microgravity impacts the methane-oxidizing metabolism of methanotrophic bacteria, namely Methylorubrum podarium. As methanotrophs have never been studied in space, this investigation may unlock a novel understanding of their behavior in microgravity, leading to promising future applications such as improved life support systems in deep space. In this experiment, cameras will capture snapshots of the bacterial …

Maintaining Driveways, Lake Champlain Sea Grant

Lake Champlain Sea Grant Institute

This presentation produced by Lake Champlain Sea Grant's BLUE BTV initiative explains how driveways can contribute to stormwater and pollutant runoff into waterways, what cities, like Burlington, Vermont, are doing to encourage impervious driveways, and actions that individuals can take to maintain their own driveways to keep waterways clean.

Keeping Dogs Safe From Cyanobacteria Blooms (Habs), Lake Champlain Sea Grant

Lake Champlain Sea Grant Institute

Cyanobacteria blooms (sometimes called Harmful Algal Blooms or HABs) are overgrowths of a type of bacteria that use sunlight to reproduce in lakes and ponds. Cyanobacteria blooms sometimes produce potent toxins that can poison people, pets, and livestock. The presence of these blooms is increasing in many areas, putting both animals and humans at risk.

This brochure will help you understand the risks, how to recognize cyanobacteria blooms, how to keep both you and your dog safe from exposure, as well as what to do if your dog has been exposed to a bloom or poisoned by toxins.

Best Lawn Care Practices, Lake Champlain Sea Grant

Lake Champlain Sea Grant Institute

Lawn care practices that contribute to a healthy lawn and better water quality are described.

Programs in Burlington, Vermont, are described.

Introducing Lake Champlain Sea Grant And Programs For Real Estate Professionals, Linda Patterson

Lake Champlain Sea Grant Institute

Lake Champlain Sea Grant offers accredited workshops to Vermont and New York real estate professionals. Real estate professionals are often the first (and sometimes only) source of information for buyers and sellers about construction and alterations in regulated areas (such as wetlands and river corridors), potential flood risks, septic requirements, shoreland protection, and related topics. Realtors also gain valuable information about state and local resources that they can pass on to their clients.

All courses award Vermont continuing education credits. New York credits are available for the septic course, with others pending. Courses are listed in the presentation.

Stormwater Subsurface Gravel Wetlands In Vermont: Permitting, Performance, And Chloride Concerns, Watershed Consulting Associates, Llc, University Of Vermont

Lake Champlain Sea Grant Institute

Subsurface gravel wetlands (SGW) are water treatment practices that utilize a saturated bed of gravel and (sometimes) wetland vegetation to filter incoming water and remove pollutants through a combination of physical filtration, adsorption, biological uptake, and microbial transformation. Water level is controlled by an outlet structure to retain a permanent subsurface pool, providing retention of stormwater volume in addition to pollutant removal. SGW are becoming increasingly popular tools for stormwater treatment in Vermont.

A varied group of partners including academic researchers, municipal stormwater managers, and consulting designers and engineers, have identified questions around stormwater gravel wetland performance as significant in …

Distribution Of Particulate Organic Carbon – Fluxes And Inventories – In Growth-Faulted Coastal Wetlands, Samuel Joel Whitehead

Theses and Dissertations--Earth and Environmental Sciences

Coastal wetlands along the Northern Gulf of Mexico (NGOMx) are critically important but threatened environments which provide significant and diverse economic, social, and environmental value. These environments are essential components to the global carbon cycle, serving as one of the most efficient terrestrial carbon sinks. Since onset of the Industrial Revolution increasing rates of coastal wetland loss have been documented due to a variety of anthropogenic activities, neotectonic processes, subsidence, and rising sea-levels. This research utilized an array of methods and sedimentological analyses to test the hypothesis that growth-fault induced changes at Earth’s surface affects the delivery to, and storage …

The Revised Systematics And Paleoecology Of The Devonian Stemless Crinoid Genus Edriocrinus Hall, 1858, Catherine E. Herbert

Theses and Dissertations--Earth and Environmental Sciences

New morphological observations of Edriocrinus Hall, 1858, enable a modern, holistic view of this unusual crinoid genus, previously included in the Superorder Flexibilia (Zittel, 1895) Wright et al., 2017. Re-analysis of Edriocrinus suggests that the genus should now be assigned to the Order ‘Dendrocrinida’ within the Magnorder Eucladida Wright, 2017 based on the five infrabasals, single radianal in the cup, absent anal sac, and non-pinnulate arms with rectangular uniserial brachials. Moreover, examination of the slight variations separating the current 14 Edriocrinus species indicates that these “species” are likely ecophenotypes. The current Edriocrinus species are revised based on firmly bound calyx …

The Performance Optimization Of Asp Solving Based On Encoding Rewriting And Encoding Selection, Liu Liu

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

Answer set programming (ASP) has long been used for modeling and solving hard search problems. These problems are modeled in ASP as encodings, a collection of rules that declaratively describe the logic of the problem without explicitly listing how to solve it. It is common that the same problem has several different but equivalent encodings in ASP. Experience shows that the performance of these ASP encodings may vary greatly from instance to instance when processed by current state-of-the-art ASP grounder/solver systems. In particular, it is rarely the case that one encoding outperforms all others. Moreover, running an ASP system on …

The Lick Agn Monitoring Project 2016: Velocity-Resolved Hβ Lags In Luminous Seyfert Galaxies, Vivian U, Aaron J. Barth, H. Alexander Vogler, Hengxiao Guo, Tommaso Treu, Vardha N. Bennert, Gabriela Canalizo, Alexei V. Filippenko, Elinor Gates, Frederick Hamann, Michael D. Joner, Matthew A. Malkan, Anna Pancoast, Peter R. Williams, Jong-Hak Woo, Bela Abolfathi, L. E. Abramson, Stephen F. Armen, Hyun-Jin Bae, Thomas Bohn, Benjamin D. Boizelle, Azalee Bostroem, Andrew Brandel, Thomas G. Brink, Sanyum Channa, M. C. Cooper, Maren Cosens, Edward Donohue, Sean P. Fillingham, Diego González-Buitrago, Goni Halevi, Andrew Halle, Carol E. Hood, Keith Horne, J. Chuck Horst, Maxime De Kouchkovsky, Benjamin Kuhn, Sahana Kumar, Douglas C. Leonard, Donald Loveland, Christina Manzano-King, Ian Mchardy, Raúl Michel, Melanie Kae B. Olaes, Daeseong Park, Songyoun Park, Liuyi Pei, Timothy W. Ross, Jordan N. Runco, Jenna Samuel, Javier Sánchez, Bryan Scott, Remington O. Sexton, Jaejin Shin, Isaac Shivvers, Chance L. Spencer, Benjamin E. Stahl, Samantha Stegman, Isak Stomberg, Stefano Valenti, L. Villafaña, Jonelle L. Walsh, Heechan Yuk, Weikang Zheng

Physics

We carried out spectroscopic monitoring of 21 low-redshift Seyfert 1 galaxies using the Kast double spectrograph on the 3 m Shane telescope at Lick Observatory from 2016 April to 2017 May. Targeting active galactic nuclei (AGNs) with luminosities of λLλ(5100 Å) ≈ 1044 erg s−1 and predicted Hβ lags of ∼20–30 days or black hole masses of 107–108.5 M⊙, our campaign probes luminosity-dependent trends in broad-line region (BLR) structure and dynamics as well as to improve calibrations for single-epoch estimates of quasar black hole masses. Here we present the first results from the campaign, including …

The Lick Agn Monitoring Project 2016: Velocity-Resolved Hβ Lags In Luminous Seyfert Galaxies, Vivian U, Aaron J. Barth, H. Alexander Vogler, Hengxiao Guo, Tommaso Treu, Vardha N. Bennert, Gabriela Canalizo, Alexei V. Filippenko, Elinor Gates, Frederick Hamann, Michael D. Joner, Matthew A. Malkan, Anna Pancoast, Peter R. Williams, Jong-Hak Woo, Bela Abolfathi, L. E. Abramson, Stephen F. Armen, Hyun-Jin Bae, Thomas Bohn, Benjamin D. Boizelle, Azalee Bostroem, Andrew Brandel, Thomas G. Brink, Sanyum Channa, M. C. Cooper, Maren Cosens, Edward Donohue, Sean P. Fillingham, Diego González-Buitrago, Goni Halevi, Andrew Halle, Carole E. Hood, Keith Horne, J. Chuck Horst, Maxime De Kouchkovsky, Benjamin Kuhn, Sahana Kumar, Douglas C. Leonard, Donald Loveland, Christina Manzano-King, Ian Mchardy, Raúl Michel, Melanie Kae B. Olaes, Daeseong Park, Songyoun Park, Liuyi Pei, Timothy W. Ross, Jordan N. Runco, Jenna Samuel, Javier Sánchez, Bryan Scott, Remington O. Sexton, Jaejin Shin, Isaac Shivvers, Chance L. Spencer, Benjamin E. Stahl, Samantha Stegman, Isak Stomberg, Stefano Valenti, L. Villafaña, Jonelle L. Walsh, Heechan Yuk, Weikang Zheng

Physics

We carried out spectroscopic monitoring of 21 low-redshift Seyfert 1 galaxies using the Kast double spectrograph on the 3 m Shane telescope at Lick Observatory from 2016 April to 2017 May. Targeting active galactic nuclei (AGNs) with luminosities of λLλ(5100 Å) ≈ 1044 erg s−1 and predicted Hβ lags of ∼20–30 days or black hole masses of 107–108.5 M⊙, our campaign probes luminosity-dependent trends in broad-line region (BLR) structure and dynamics as well as to improve calibrations for single-epoch estimates of quasar black hole masses. Here we present the first results from the campaign, including …

Did They Really Tweet That?, Caleb Bradford, Michael L. Nelson (Mentor)

Computer & Information Science: Research Experiences for Undergraduates in Disinformation Detection and Analytics

No abstract provided.

Developing A Virtual Modular Synthesizer For Sound Waves And Midi, Margaret Jagger

Senior Independent Study Theses

Modular synthesis involves the alteration and modification of digital sound signals. Thus, this modular synthesizer allows a user the option of supplying their own MIDI-compatible controller to serve as an input source, or to use the built-in pure sound waves instead. Either input will be fed into the domain-specific language SuperCollider and altered, with specific sound modifications dependent on the input source used. Using theoretical knowledge of the physics behind the motion of sound waves, various modules and functionalities are created. Then, with SuperCollider, these modules are implemented into a synthesizer which accepts either pure sound waves or MIDI as …

Sediment Survey: Yr070111, Station 3926, Clay Bank, York River Virginia, Grace M. Massey, Patrick J. Dickhudt, Carl T. Friedrichs

Data

This dataset consists of sediment properties including grain size distribution, percent moisture, percent organic matter, sediment bed erodibility, as well as (in most cases) x-ray images of the sediment structure. Most samples were taken in support of an Acoustic Doppler Velocimeter (ADV) tripod deployed in nearby location.