Digital Commons Network^™

Top-Down Construction Cost Estimating Model Using An Artificial Neural Network, Douglas D. Gransberg, H. David Jeong, Ilker Karaca, Brendon Gardner

Ilker Karaca

This report contains the information and background on top-down cost estimating using artificial neural networks (ANN)_to enhance the accuracy of MDT early estimates of construction costs. Upon conducting an extensive review of MDT’s budgeting and cost estimating efforts, and following a survey of agency experts on the identification of the most salient project attributes with the dual-objectives of low effort and high accuracy, a rational method for top-down variable selection is proposed. Selected variables were further tested in their explanatory power of construction costs through the application of two cost estimating methodologies—multiple regression and artificial neural network methodologies. Both methods …

Would The Ada Pass Today?: Disability Rights In An Age Of Partisan Polarization, Laura Rothstein

Laura Rothstein

The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA) was the most significant civil rights legislation enacted since the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It provided comprehensive protection against discrimination for individuals with disabilities in employment, public accommodations, and public services. It built on § 504 of the Rehabilitation Act that provided these protections only to programs receiving federal financial assistance. It afforded broad access to those individuals who had benefitted from the 1975 Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. This complex and far-reaching legislation was made possible by a confluence of timing and the right people at the right place at …

Common Law Punitive Damages: Something For Everyone?, Doug Rendleman

Doug Rendleman

Common law punitive damages have some feature that will get everyone's goat: a civil court meting out quasi-criminal punishment; a sanction, punishment, imposed after mere civil procedure; a civil jury stretching imprecise instructions into Robin Hood justice; a private plaintiff receiving a windfall that exceeds any reasonable estimate of loss; and, finally, the Supreme Court wielding the discredited doctrine of substantive due process. This article will examine the preceding fault lines and the countervailing considerations, devoting more attention to substantive due process than the others. It will then turn to Exxon Shipping Co. v. Baker, and include some modest …

Function Concept: Learning From History, Ruthmae Sears, Dung Tran, Seoung Woo Lee, Amanda Thomas

Ruthmae Sears

No abstract provided.

Ecophysiology Of Potentilla Gracilis Douglas Ex Hook (Rosaceae): Effects Of Night Temperature And Water Stress On Photosynthetic Gas Exchange, Madhav Nepal

Madhav Nepal

Supporting The Diverse Needs Of Students By Developing Success Skills In Introductory Psychology, Sarah Grison

Sarah Grison

Valuation Of Flexibility And Investment Timing In Airport Infrastructure Projects: Cases In Airport Expansions And Alternate Design Alternate Bid Bidding, Ilker Karaca

Ilker Karaca

Many large infrastructure projects are subject to considerable uncertainty over their revenue streams which makes their valuations particularly challenging. When project scalability can be altered as new information is revealed over the course of a project’s lifecycle, the presence of uncertainty can, in fact, provide option values that are ignored with static Net Present Value (NPV) analyses. To achieve these benefits, however, a better understanding of volatility is of the essence. This dissertation seeks to demonstrate how a better understanding of the business risks could facilitate the valuation of flexibility options in investment timing and engineering design. It also details …

The Silliness Of Magical Realism, Kevin M. Clermont

Kevin M. Clermont

Relative plausibility, even after countless explanatory articles, remains an underdeveloped model bereft of underlying theory. Multivalent logic, a fully developed and accepted system of logic, comes to the same endpoint as relative plausibility. Multivalent logic would thus provide the missing theory, while it would resolve all the old problems of using traditional probability theory to explain the standards of proof as well as the new problems raised by the relative plausibility model. For example, multivalent logic resolves the infamous ‘conjunction paradox’ that traditional probability creates for itself, and which relative plausibility tries to sweep under the rug.

Yet Professors Allen …

Abstention At The Border, Maggie Gardner

Maggie Gardner

The lower federal courts have been invoking “international comity abstention” to solve a range of problems in cross-border cases, using a wide array of tests that vary not just across the circuits, but within them as well. That confusion will only grow, as both scholars and the Supreme Court have yet to clarify what exactly “international comity abstention” entails. Meanwhile, the breadth of “international comity abstention” stands in tension with the Supreme Court’s recent reemphasis on the federal judiciary’s obligation to exercise congressionally granted jurisdiction. Indeed, loose applications of “international comity abstention” risk undermining not only the expressed preferences of …

Turbulent Dispersion In Cloudy Boundary Layers, Remco A. Verzijlbergh, Harmen J.J. Jonker, Thijs Heus, J. Vilà-Guerau De Arellano

Thijs Heus

Compared to dry boundary layers, dispersion in cloud-topped boundary layers has received less attention. In this LES based numerical study we investigate the dispersion of a passive tracer in the form of Lagrangian particles for four kinds of atmospheric boundary layers: 1) a dry convective boundary layer (for reference), 2) a "smoke" cloud boundary layer in which the turbulence is driven by radiative cooling, 3) a stratocumulus topped boundary layer and 4) a shallow cumulus topped boundary layer. We show that the dispersion characteristics of the smoke cloud boundary layer as well as the stratocumulus situation can be well understood …

Observational Validation Of The Compensating Mass Flux Through The Shell Around Cumulus Clouds, Thijs Heus, C. Freek J. Pols, Harmen J.J. Jonker, Harry E.A. Van Den Akker, Donald H. Lenschow

Thijs Heus

The existence of a subsiding shell around cumulus clouds has been observed before in several aircraft measurement campaigns. Recent results from large-eddy simulations (LES) showed that the downward mass flux through the shell compensates for a significant fraction of the upward mass flux through the cloud. In this study, aeroplane measurements from the Rain In Cumulus over the Ocean (RICO) field campaign are used to verify the existence of this compensating mass flux. Just as in the LES results, the in-shell downward mass flux is found to be significant. However, a few differences were found in comparison with the LES …

Reconciling And Validating The Cloud Thickness And Liquid Water Path Tendencies, Mohamed S. Ghonima, Joel R. Norris, Thijs Heus, Jan Kleissl

Thijs Heus

A detailed derivation of stratocumulus cloud thickness and liquid water path tendencies as a function of the well-mixed boundary layer mass, heat, and moisture budget equations is presented. The derivation corrects an error in the cloud thickness tendency equation derived by R. Wood to make it consistent with the liquid water path tendency equation derived by J. J. van der Dussen et al. The validity of the tendency equations is then tested against the output of large-eddy simulations of a typical stratocumulus-topped boundary layer case and is found to be in good agreement.

Large-Eddy Simulation Of Organized Precipitating Trade Wind Cumulus Clouds, Axel Seifert, Thijs Heus

Thijs Heus

Trade wind cumulus clouds often organize in along-wind cloud streets and across-wind mesoscale arcs. We present a benchmark large-eddy simulation which resolves the individual clouds as well as the mesoscale organization on scales of O(10 km). Different methods to quantify organization of cloud fields are applied and discussed. Using perturbed physics large-eddy simulation experiments, the processes leading to the formation of cloud clusters and the mesoscale arcs are revealed. We find that both cold pools as well as the sub-cloud layer moisture field are crucial to understand the organization of precipitating shallow convection. Further sensitivity studies show that microphysical assumptions …

Formulation Of The Dutch Atmospheric Large-Eddy Simulation (Dales) And Overview Of Its Applications, Thijs Heus, C. C. Van Heerwaarden, Harmen J.J. Jonker, A. Pier Siebesma, S. Axelsen, K. Van Den Dries, O. Geoffroy, A. F. Moene, D. Pino, S. R. De Roode, J. Vilà-Guerau De Arellano

Thijs Heus

The current version of the Dutch Atmospheric Large-Eddy Simulation (DALES) is presented. DALES is a large-eddy simulation code designed for studies of the physics of the atmospheric boundary layer, including convective and stable boundary layers as well as cloudy boundary layers. In addition, DALES can be used for studies of more specific cases, such as flow over sloping or heterogeneous terrain, and dispersion of inert and chemically active species. This paper contains an extensive description of the physical and numerical formulation of the code, and gives an overview of its applications and accomplishments in recent years.

Factors Controlling Stratocumulus Cloud Lifetime Over Coastal Land, Mohamed S. Ghonima, Thijs Heus, Joel R. Norris, Jan Kleissl

Thijs Heus

The breakup of stratocumulus clouds over coastal land areas is studied using a combination of large-eddy simulations (LESs) and mixed-layer models (MLMs) with a focus on mechanisms regulating the timing of the breakup. In contrast with stratocumulus over ocean, strong sensible heat flux over land prevents the cloud layer from decoupling during day. As the cloud thins during day, turbulence generated by surface flux becomes larger than turbulence generated by longwave cooling across the cloud layer. To capture this shift in turbulence generation in the MLM, an existing entrainment parameterization is extended. The MLM is able to mimic cloud evolution …

Direct Numerical Simulation Of Evaporative Cooling At The Lateral Boundary Of Shallow Cumulus Clouds, Dick Abma, Thijs Heus, Juan Pedro Mellado

Thijs Heus

This study investigates the dynamics of the subsiding shell at the lateral boundary of cumulus clouds, focusing on the role of evaporative cooling. Since the size of this shell is well below what large-eddy simulations can resolve, the authors have performed direct numerical simulations of an idealized subsiding shell. The system develops a self-similar, Reynolds number–independent flow that allows for the determination of explicit scaling laws relating the characteristic length, time, and velocity scales of the shell. It is found that the shell width grows quadratically in time, linearly with the traveled distance. The magnitude of these growth rates shows …

Fluctuations In A Quasi-Stationary Shallow Cumulus Cloud Ensemble, M. Sakradzija, Axel Seifert, Thijs Heus

Thijs Heus

We propose an approach to stochastic parameterisation of shallow cumulus clouds to represent the convective variability and its dependence on the model resolution. To collect information about the individual cloud lifecycles and the cloud ensemble as a whole, we employ a large eddy simulation (LES) model and a cloud tracking algorithm, followed by conditional sampling of clouds at the cloud-base level. In the case of a shallow cumulus ensemble, the cloud-base mass flux distribution is bimodal, due to the different shallow cloud subtypes, active and passive clouds. Each distribution mode can be approximated using a Weibull distribution, which is a …

Automated Tracking Of Shallow Cumulus Clouds In Large Domain, Long Duration Large Eddy Simulations, Thijs Heus, Axel Seifert

Thijs Heus

This paper presents a method for feature tracking of fields of shallow cumulus convection in large eddy simulations (LES) by connecting the projected cloud cover in space and time, and by accounting for splitting and merging of cloud objects. Existing methods tend to be either imprecise or, when using the full three-dimensional (3-D) spatial field, prohibitively expensive for large data sets. Compared to those 3-D methods, the current method reduces the memory footprint by up to a factor 100, while retaining most of the precision by correcting for splitting and merging events between different clouds. The precision of the algorithm …

A Statistical Approach To The Life Cycle Analysis Of Cumulus Clouds Selected In A Virtual Reality Environment, Thijs Heus, Harmen J.J. Jonker, Harry E.A. Van Den Akker, Eric J. Griffith, Michal Koutek, Frits H. Post

Thijs Heus

In this study, a new method is developed to investigate the entire life cycle of shallow cumuli in large eddy simulations. Although trained observers have no problem in distinguishing the different life stages of a cloud, this process proves difficult to automate, because cloud-splitting and cloud-merging events complicate the distinction between a single system divided in several cloudy parts and two independent systems that collided. Because the human perception is well equipped to capture and to make sense of these time-dependent three-dimensional features, a combination of automated constraints and human inspection in a three-dimensional virtual reality environment is used to …

Cgils: Results From The First Phase Of An International Project To Understand The Physical Mechanisms Of Low Cloud Feedbacks In Single Column Models, Minghua Zhang, Christopher S. Bretherton, Peter N. Blossey, Phillip H. Austin, Julio T. Bacmeister, Sandrine Bony, Florent Brient, Suvarchal K. Cheedela, Anning Cheng, Anthony D. Del Genio, Stephan R. De Roode, Satoshi Endo, Charmaine N. Franklin, Jean Christophe Golaz, Cecile Hannay, Thijs Heus

Thijs Heus

CGILS—the CFMIP-GASS Intercomparison of Large Eddy Models (LESs) and single column models (SCMs)—investigates the mechanisms of cloud feedback in SCMs and LESs under idealized climate change perturbation. This paper describes the CGILS results from 15 SCMs and 8 LES models. Three cloud regimes over the subtropical oceans are studied: shallow cumulus, cumulus under stratocumulus, and well-mixed coastal stratus/stratocumulus. In the stratocumulus and coastal stratus regimes, SCMs without activated shallow convection generally simulated negative cloud feedbacks, while models with active shallow convection generally simulated positive cloud feedbacks. In the shallow cumulus alone regime, this relationship is less clear, likely due to …

Two Games Displayed By Butler’S 2017 Celebration Of Mind, Jeremiah Farrell

Jeremiah Farrell

Jeremiah's two games displayed by Butler's 2017 Celebration of Mind.

Flying Saucer, Jeremiah Farrell, Karen Farrell

Jeremiah Farrell

Jeremiah's puzzle "Flying Saucer", which was exchanged at the 2013 International Puzzle Party in Washington, DC. 100 puzzle designers create 100 copies of their puzzle and pass it out at the party and exchange them. This puzzle is also manufactured by Walter Hoppe as "Flying Saucer".

Review Essay: Law And Migrant Labor In The 20th Century: Ghost Workers And Global Capitalism, Ruth M. Gomberg-Muñoz

Ruth Gomberg-Munoz

Large-scale movements of workers, production lines, commodities, and centers of power have been integral to capitalist development since its earliest stages (see Mintz 1986; Wallerstein 2011; Wolf 1997). Today, mobility continues to uphold global capitalism in important respects (Sassen 1988). In particular, the capacity to move production across nation-state borders has allowed capitalist industries to take advantage of post-colonial inequalities as they reorganize production in ways and places that reduce manufacturing costs and enhance corporate profit...

The Complicit Anthropologist, Ruth Gomberg‐Muñoz

Ruth Gomberg-Munoz

The invitation to become “accomplices, not allies” is a timely and urgent summons to a political left that has recently swelled with renewed vigor. Galvanized to contest the Trump administration, freshly politicized young people and veteran activists alike have a spectrum of options for political engagement—few of which seriously threaten to dismantle broader systems of inequality and injustice. In line with Rosa and Bonilla's call to avoid exceptionalizing Trump in favor of more critical and robust analyses of colonialism, racism, and U.S. statehood, the call to become accomplices urges progressives to avoid the deceptive comfort of allyship, and, instead, to …

Heart Is Active Citizenship: Reimagining Civic Education, Seungho Moon, Jenna Mortensen Nelson, Yeorim Hwang, Mary Danley

Seungho Moon

The ARtS (Aesthetic, Reflexive thoughts, & Sharing) Initiative is an innovative program for engaging children in reflexive thought about active citizenship in urban communities. This article explicates how children use art to imagine the alternatives in civic education. Using the heart metaphor as active citizenship, the authors illustrate how this organ connects citizens and pumps our desire for a better community through our veins, thus instigating social change. This article demonstrates the power of imagination to inspire students to conceptualize a more just society.

Seodang: A Pilgrimage Toward Knowledge/Action And "Us-Ness" In The Community, Seungho Moon

Seungho Moon

The purpose of this article is to present a Korean theory of epistemology and to provide an epistemological embodiment of Korean epistemology as it appears in a traditional, local village school called a seodang. A seodang’s curriculum is grounded upon individualized instruction and whole person education and emphasizes mutually respectful relationships that sustain supportive local communities. I have attempted to create an intersection between cultural elements present within Korea’s indigenous knowledge and innovative research methodology by making use of multilingual representations, visual interpretations of the text, and cultural poetry. By weaving together these two stripes of epistemology and methodology, I …

The Declaration Of Independence And Constitutional Interpretation, Alexander Tsesis

Alexander Tsesis

This Article argues that the Reconstruction Amendments incorporated the human dignity values of the Declaration of Independence. The original Constitution contained clauses, which protected the institution of slavery, that were irreconcilable with the normative commitments the nation had undertaken at independence. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments set the country aright by formally incorporating the Declaration of Independence's principles for representative governance into the Constitution.

The Declaration of Independence provides valuable insights into matters of human dignity, privacy, and self-government. Its statements about human rights, equality, and popular sovereignty establish a foundational rule of interpretation. While the Supreme Court has …

Balancing Free Speech, Alexander Tsesis

Alexander Tsesis

This article develops a theory for balancing free speech against other express and implied constitutional, statutory, and doctrinal values. It posits that free speech considerations should be connected to the underlying purpose of constitutional governance. When deciding difficult cases involving competing rights, judges should examine (1) whether unencumbered expression is likely to cause constitutional, statutory, or common law harms; (2) whether the restricted expression has been historically or traditionally protected; (3) whether a government policy designed to benefit the general welfare weighs in favor of the regulation; (4) the fit between the disputed speech regulation and the public end; and …

The Declaration Of Independence As Introduction To The Constitution, Alexander Tsesis

Alexander Tsesis

No abstract provided.

Just Listening: The Equal Hearing Principle And The Moral Life Of Judges, Barry Sullivan

Barry Sullivan

No abstract provided.