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Full-Text Articles in Physical Sciences and Mathematics

Spatial And Temporal Expression Of Vegetation And Atmospheric Variability From Stable Carbon And Nitrogen Isotope Analysis Of Bat Guano In The Southern United States, Christopher M. Wurster, Donald A. Mcfarlane, Michael I. Bird Jan 2007

Spatial And Temporal Expression Of Vegetation And Atmospheric Variability From Stable Carbon And Nitrogen Isotope Analysis Of Bat Guano In The Southern United States, Christopher M. Wurster, Donald A. Mcfarlane, Michael I. Bird

WM Keck Science Faculty Papers

Stable isotopes of faeces contain information related to the animals feeding ecology. The use of stable isotope values from subfossil faeces as a palaeoenvironmental indicator depends on how faithfully the animal records their local environment. Here we present insectivorous bat guano δ13C and δ15N values from a precipitation gradient across the southern United States and northern Mexico to compare with local vegetation and climate. We find δ13C values to be an excellent predictor of expected C4/CAM vegetation, indicating that the bats are non-selective in their diet. Moreover, we find bat guano δ …


A Classifier To Evaluate Language Specificity In Medical Documents, Trudi Miller '08, Gondy A. Leroy, Samir Chatterjee, Jie Fan, Brian Thoms '09 Jan 2007

A Classifier To Evaluate Language Specificity In Medical Documents, Trudi Miller '08, Gondy A. Leroy, Samir Chatterjee, Jie Fan, Brian Thoms '09

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

Consumer health information written by health care professionals is often inaccessible to the consumers it is written for. Traditional readability formulas examine syntactic features like sentence length and number of syllables, ignoring the target audience's grasp of the words themselves. The use of specialized vocabulary disrupts the understanding of patients with low reading skills, causing a decrease in comprehension. A naive Bayes classifier for three levels of increasing medical terminology specificity (consumer/patient, novice health learner, medical professional) was created with a lexicon generated from a representative medical corpus. Ninety-six percent accuracy in classification was attained. The classifier was then applied …