Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Like Mother Like Child: An Investigation Of Mother Characteristics And Child Temperaments, Tempus Fugitt

Statistics

Much research has gone into what biological and social factors raise the risk of children developing cognitive, social, or behavioral problems. This project looks at what characteristics of the mother are significantly associated with different temperaments in the child which may predict problems developed in the child later in life. These characteristics include mother’s age, her education level, household income, parenting attitudes, involvement with the child, and drug and alcohol use. Data was used from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study conducted by the Office of Population Research at Princeton University. Cumulative logistic regression was used to analyze the …

Completeness Of Ordered Fields, James Forsythe Hall

Mathematics

The main goal of this project is to prove the equivalency of several characterizations of completeness of Archimedean ordered fields; some of which appear in most modern literature as theorems following from the Dedekind completeness of the real numbers, while a couple are not as well known and have to do with other areas of mathematics, such as nonstandard analysis. Continuing, we study the completeness of non-Archimedean fields, and provide several examples of such fields with varying degrees of properties, using nonstandard analysis to produce some relatively "nice" (in particular, they are Cantor complete) final examples. As a small detour, …

Exoplanet Transit Detection With Terrestrial Amateur Equipment: Using The Cal Poly Observatory, San Luis Obispo, Joshua Thompson

Physics

Using amateur level equipment and freeware analysis tools, the Cal Poly Observatory (CPO) wished to test whether or not it could actually observe the astronomical phenomena called exoplanetary transits. Using a variety of equipment and tests, the CPO was able to confirm it could clearly observe the transits of several well-known transiting planets, including HD189733b and HAT-P-6. With these tests and observations completed, future student researchers can continue Cal Poly’s transit search and contribute to the global pursuit for exoplanets.

Could Alice Find The Elusive Higgs?, Tyler Williams

Physics

The Higgs boson is the theoretical mechanism for creating the mass of particles. Although it has never been seen, the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the most likely place for it to be created in the laboratory. The ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) detector is focused on the study of heavy ion collisions at the LHC and was not designed to find the Higgs boson; however, there is a chance it could be detected there. Although the luminosity (collision rate) for PbPb collisions is much lower than that for pp collisions, PbPb collisions have a higher probability to …

A Brief History And Research Of The Supernova Remnant Cassiopeia A, Michelle Wilbur

Physics

No abstract provided.

Liquid Helium Refill Shifts At The Cryogenic Underground Observatory For Rare Events, Robin L. Reil

Physics

No abstract provided.

An Investigation Of Process Parameters To Optimize The Fiber Diameter Of Electrospun Vascular Scaffolds Through Experimental Design, Steffi Wong

Biomedical Engineering

No abstract provided.

Terrain Impostors, William Hamilton Hess

Master's Theses

Interactive software applications which need to render large terrain meshes can suffer from slow frame rates if the geometry of the terrain is sufficiently dense. However, the viewing angle to many distant features of the terrain does not change rapidly with respect to time. If the movement of the viewing position is limited to continuous motion and restrained to a known speed, many terrain features may be rendered once in high detail and reused for several frames.

This thesis proposes a method to increase the rendering speed of large complex terrains by splitting the terrain into contiguous chunks. If a …

Digital And Printed Magazines’ Effects On The Environment, Jeannie Nguyen

Graphic Communication

The purpose of this study was to show how printed magazines affect the environment with their use of paper and how digital magazines affect their environment with their electricity use from servers hosting the digital magazines. It is also to find how the printed magazine industry is reducing their paper use and how digital magazines are reducing the amount of electricity used by servers hosting the digital magazines.

Results show that printed magazines use a massive amount of paper to produce millions of magazines and that the process of getting paper produces a large amount of carbon dioxide which is …

Functional Reactive Musical Performers, Justin M. Phillips

Master's Theses

Computers have been assisting in recording, sound synthesis and other fields of music production for quite some time. The actual performance of music continues to be an area in which human players are chosen over computer performers. Musical performance is an area in which personalization is more important than consistency. Human players play with each other, reacting to phrases and ideas created by the players that they are playing with. Computer performers lack the ability to react to the changes in the performance that humans perceive naturally, giving the human players an advantage over the computer performers.

This thesis creates …

Creation Of A Revised Site Specific Liquefaction Potential Map Utilizing Geographic Information Systems (Gis) Technology And Arcgis® Software, Michael S. Armstrong

Earth and Soil Sciences

No abstract provided.

Construction And Improvement Of A Scheffler Reflector And Thermal Storage Device, Jason Rapp

Physics

We constructed and successfully tested a 2 m2 parabolic dish solar concentrator (Scheffler Concentrator) to focus sunlight onto a stationary target. Present efforts are to decrease the construction complexity and cost of the concentrator. In order to store solar heat, we also constructed and are testing a thermal storage device made of sand (for thermal mass), and pumice (for insulation). Preliminary tests indicate thermal retention times of many hours. Present efforts are to increase accessible power, and structural integrity.

Bottom Quark Detection With The Electromagnetic Calorimeter At Alice, Christopher Ryan Brown

Physics

Bottom quarks are one of the easiest ways to observe quark flow in a quark gluon plasma. For this reason, it is advantageous in a detector to have superb capabilities at detecting bottom quarks through their decay products and interactions. This paper will provide an overview of bottom quark behavior in a quark gluon plasma, as well as methods used to detect this behavior. Once this has been established, an overview of the heavy ion physics at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), and particularly A Large Ion Collider Experiment (ALICE), will be discussed. It will then be argued that the …

St. Jude Medical: An Object-Oriented Software Architecture For Embedded And Real-Time Medical Devices, Atila Amiri

Master's Theses

Medical devices used for surgical or therapeutic purposes require a high degree of safety and effectiveness. Software is critical component of many such medical devices. The software architecture of a system defines organizational structure and the runtime characteristic of the application used to control the operation of the system and provides a set of frameworks that are used to develop that. As such, the design of software architecture is a critical element in achieving the intended functionality, performance, and safety requirements of a medical device. This architecture uses object-oriented design techniques, which model the underlying system as a set of …

Asynchronous Mips Processors: Educational Simulations, Robert L. Webb

Master's Theses

The system clock has been omnipresent in most mainstream chip designs. While simplifying many design problems the clock has caused the problems of clock skew, high power consumption, electromagnetic interference, and worst-case performance. In recent years, as the timing constraints of synchronous designs have been squeezed ever tighter, the efficiencies of asynchronous designs have become more attractive. By removing the clock, these issues can be mitigated. How- ever, asynchronous designs are generally more complex and difficult to debug. In this paper I discuss the advantages of asynchronous processors and the specifics of some asynchronous designs, outline the roadblocks to asynchronous …

Wii-Mote Head Tracking: A Three Dimensional Virtual Reality Display, David Fairman

Computer Engineering

The goal of this project is to create a customizable three dimensional virtual reality display on a system available to any non-technical user. This System will use the infrared camera component of a standard Nintendo Wii-mote to track a user's head motions in all six major directions. The virtual reality will be a customizable image projected onto a screen or simply shown on a computer or TV monitor. In order to appear 3-dimensional, the image will continually change according to the position of the user's head. As the user moves their head to the left and right, portions of the …

Max Flow Spill Code Placement Algorithm Implemented In Gcc 4.4.3, Stephen Robert Beard

Computer Engineering

The placement of spill code plays an important role in the register allocator of an optimizing compiler. Many computer architectures possess a register linkage convention that dictates which registers are preserved across function calls and which are not. This project addresses the problem of optimizing spill code that is associated with register linkage conventions.

This algorithm was created by Dr. Chris Lupo and is described in the paper Beyond Register Allocation: a Novel Algorithm for Spill-Code Placement. The algorithm was implemented for GCC 2.5.7 for a PA-RISC architecture [4]. The work in this project will involve porting the existing code …

Optimization Of P3ht-Pcbm Polymer Solar Cells Through Device Simulation And Manufacturing, James Boom

Computer Engineering

Given a good model and implementation of that model, computer simulation can be used to reduce the time and material costs of research. To this end I worked with other students to manufacture, test and simulate the single layer P3HT-PCBM solar cell. Using the data collected from this project, future work can then be done with the project's simulator to further optimize these types of solar cell devices.

A Study Of Soil Development On Marine And Stream Terraces Of Swanton Pacific Ranch, Davenport, Ca, Genevieve M. Widrig, Kristine W. Johnson, Anna E. Tornincasa

Earth and Soil Sciences

No abstract provided.

The Influence Of Vegetation And Landscape Position On Soil Temperature Change In A Sagebrush-Steppe Eastern Sierra Environment: Implications On Soil Taxonomy, Nathan Michael Lurie

Earth and Soil Sciences

Soil temperature is a parameter that has been studied for a considerable time and from many different perspectives. However, relatively few studies have been conducted for taxonomic purposes and fewer still have focused on how changes in soil temperature related to global climate change may affect soil taxonomy. Soil temperature regimes are used to subdivide soils with similar properties that exist in dissimilar climate zones requiring different management practices depending on intended use. Seven sites with variable surficial features were used for this study within a cohesive sagebrush-steppe Eastern Sierra glacial moraine landform. Soil temperature was measured once a month …

Management And Control Plan For Zinfandel Vines In South Paso Robles, Ca., Tanner E. Campbell

Earth and Soil Sciences

Zinfandel, also known as Zin, is a red skinned variety of wine grape very popular in California. The wines produced from Zinfandel grapes have an intense fruitiness and luscious texture. Production is extremely variable throughout California and is dependent upon, climate, soil fertility, crop level management practices, and irrigation. This study was conducted to determine the on site soil physical and chemical properties as a means to obtain optimal yields and fruit quality. The A & L Western Agriculture Laboratories performed comprehensive fertility analysis to determine the concentrations of the plant essential nutrients, organic matter, electrical conductivity, cation exchange capacity, …

Urban Heat Island Expansion In The Greater Las Vegas Metropolitan Area, Alex Remar

Earth and Soil Sciences

The growth of human settlements into vast urban metropolitan areas is often accompanied by relatively higher temperatures in comparison with surrounding rural countrysides, a phenomenon known as the “urban heat island effect.” The city of Las Vegas has been selected as an examination of this trend because of its unprecedented urban growth in the last 50 years, which has been mapped by satellite imagery for several decades. Studying the growth of Las Vegas’ relatively new heat island can provide valuable insight into the causes and magnitude of all urban heat islands in general.

In this investigation, a series of temperature …

Fragaria Species Grown In A Greenhouse Cropping System Chemigated By Phosfite® And Bacillus® In Subsidence Of Phytophthora Fragariae And Verticillium Dahliae, Russell L. Morgan

Earth and Soil Sciences

Strawberry yields depend directly on infestation of Phytophthora fragariae and Verticillium dahliae in correspondance to the use of Phosfite and Bacillus. The objective is to find understanding of newly administered techniques in prevention of Phytophthora fragariae and Verticillium dahliae and prohibiting the use of Methyl Bromide. Application of Phosfite and Bacillus on patented Fragariae species to identify utilization of P and ZN forms and their aid in prevention of Phytophthora and Verticillium species. In the Plots on the western bench the developmental symptoms of PRR disease were absent within all infested soil containers containing the FHS-1 crop. In the plots …

Soil Infiltration Study: Measuring The Difference In Leachate Quality Between Surface Compost Application And Incorporated Compost Application, Christopher Gallo, Kristin Roberts

Earth and Soil Sciences

No abstract provided.

Measurement And Interpolation Of Sea Surface Temperature And Salinity In The Tropical Pacific: A 9,000 Nautical Mile Research Odyssey, Amber Brooks

Earth and Soil Sciences

The purpose of this project was to compare spline and inverse distance weighting interpolation tools on data collected in the tropical Pacific Ocean by ship and data from a global network of CTD floats, known as Argo floats (fig.1), to provide evidence that technological advancement and integration is aiding our understanding of the ocean-atmosphere system of planet Earth. Thirty-one sea surface temperature and salinity samples were manually taken across a 9,000 nautical mile trek of the Pacific Ocean for the months of April, May and June 2008. Argo ASCII globally gridded monthly averaged sea surface temperature and salinity data, from …

Customer Communicator, Eddie Tavarez

Computer Science and Software Engineering

No abstract provided.

Graduation Outliner, Jason Boyle

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Planning a quarterly course schedule is a difficult and laborious process for university students which must be repeated every quarter. Students are expected to determine which courses to take based on a large and complex set of requirement criteria. Most academic scheduling research has focused on faculty availability and desires. This project attempts to address the needs of students for whom no quarterly course schedule planning tool is widely available. A Java Swing-based application is described that allows students to create a graphical quarter-by-quarter visualization of the courses they plan to take. The application also accepts a list of graduation …

Automatic Junit Creation Tool: An Exploration In High Level Process Driven Automatic Test Case Creation, William Whitney

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Many software developers do not enjoy writing unit test code. Often their excuses range from testing is slow to testing is hard. Yet perhaps test derivation has to be neither. The aim of this senior project is to examine the current state of unit test creation for the Java programming language. In particular, inefficiencies with the JUnit test framework regarding test derivation are analyzed. Ultimately, a JUnit test creation tool is created that provides a high-level process for test derivation.

Study Questions For Actuarial Exam 2/Fm, Aaron Hardiek

Statistics

No abstract provided.

Manova: Type I Error Rate Analysis, Kyle Wesley Gasperik

Statistics

Multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) is most commonly used in the field of bio-statistics. Throughout this paper I conduct numerous simulations that help analyze how robust the MANOVA procedure is against its assumptions. Using Type I error rate as my measure of error, I used the R software to graph my results. The main assumption that is focused on is the equal covariance matrix assumption, which we introduce correlation between variables to see how well the MANOVA procedure performs. Overall, 70 simulations were ran, and 10 functions were created to perform all of the analysis.