Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Characterizing Coseismic Ionospheric Disturbance For Surface-Rupturing Earthquakes, Rebekah Faith Lee

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Coseismic ionospheric disturbances (CID) are commonly identified using global navigation space system (GNSS) satellites. Little research, however, has focused on using total electron content (TEC) observations to characterize acoustic sources on Earth's surface. For this thesis, I investigate the applicability of an analytical method to invert the TEC for the acoustic wave. The inversion is based on the modeling of a transfer function. Deconvolving the TEC by the transfer function gives the acoustic wave. Inverting for the acoustic wave in this way would remove phase differences in the TEC created by atmospheric-ionospheric coupling. I test the assumption in the model …

Seismic Refraction And Electrical Resistivity Tests For Fracture Induced Anisotropy In A Mountain Watershed, Aida Mendieta

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

The critical zone (CZ) is the earth’s layer where water, air, rock, and life meet. It is the zone with which humans interact most. The National Research council (2001) defines the CZ as a “heterogeneous, near surface environment in which complex interactions involving rock, soil, water, air, and living organisms regulate the natural habitat and determine the availability of life sustaining resources”. The CZ may extend roughly from the top of the vegetation canopy to the deepest part of the rock column where meteoric water circulates – this is often in the 10 – 30 m range. The upper 1-2 …

Application Of Hydrogeophysical Imaging In The Reynolds Creek Critical Zone Observatory, Travis Nielson

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

The critical zone is defined as the upper most portion of the crust extending from the top of unweathered bedrock to the top of the vegetation canopy. It is the zone in which inorganic rock is transformed into biologically useful soils and saprolites in a process termed weathering. Because the critical zone is the connection between the subsurface and surface it plays a role in a wide variety of biological, hydrologic, and climatic processes. Understanding the critical zone though is inherently difficult because its scale and heterogeneity often means direct sampling methods, e.g. soil pits and cores, under represent the …

Deriving Landscape-Scale Vegetation Cover And Aboveground Biomass In A Semi-Arid Ecosystem Using Imaging Spectroscopy, Andrew Poley

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Environmental disturbances in semi-arid ecosystems have highlighted the need to monitor current and future vegetation conditions across the landscape. Imaging spectroscopy provide the necessary information to derive vegetation characteristics at high-spatial resolutions across large geographic areas. The work of this thesis is divided into two sections focused on using imaging spectroscopy to estimate and classify vegetation cover, and approximate aboveground biomass in a semi-arid ecosystem.

The first half of this thesis assesses the ability of imaging spectroscopy to derive vegetation classes and their respective cover across large environmental gradients and ecotones often associated with semi-arid ecosystems. Optimal endmember selection and …

Mapping Soil Organic Carbon (Soc) In A Semi-Arid Mountainous Watershed Using Variables From Hyperspectral, Lidar And Traditional Datasets, Ryan Matthew Will

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Quantifying soil organic carbon (SOC) in complex terrain is challenging due to its high spatial variability. Generally, limited discrete observations of SOC data are used to develop spatially distributed maps of SOC by developing quantitative relationships between SOC and available spatially distributed variables. In many ecosystems, remotely sensed information on aboveground vegetation can be used to predict belowground carbon stocks. In this research, we developed maps of SOC across a semi-arid watershed based on discrete field observations and modeling using a suite of variables inclusive of hyperspectral and lidar datasets; these observations provide insights into the controls on soil carbon …

Uncovering New Links Through Interaction Duration, Laxmi Amulya Gundala

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Link Prediction is the problem of inferring new relationships among nodes in a network that can occur in the near future. Classical approaches mainly consider neighborhood structure similarity when linking nodes. However, we may also want to take into account whether the two nodes we are going to link will benefit from that by having an active interaction over time. For instance, it is better to link two nodes � and � if we know that these two nodes will interact in the social network in the future, rather than suggesting �, who may never interact with �. Thus, the …

Cultivating Community Interactions In Citizen Science: Connecting People To Each Other And The Environment, Bret Allen Finley

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Citizen science leverages a distributed user-base which participates in crowd-sourced scientific inquiry. Geotagger is a citizen science project that allows people to collaboratively investigate the natural world around them and share their findings. Citizens are rarely compensated for their work and individual contributors can feel isolated which leads to motivation problems. This thesis focuses on engaging citizen scientists and motivating their contributions via social interaction and engagement. As a part of this work, a number of social enhancements have been developed as extensions to the existing Geotagger project. These enhancements and their effect on social engagement were evaluated using in-field …

Variance: Secure Two-Party Protocol For Solving Yao's Millionaires' Problem In Bitcoin, Joshua Holmes

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Secure multiparty protocols are useful tools for parties wishing to jointly compute a function while keeping their input data secret. The millionaires’ problem is the first secure two-party computation problem, where the goal is to securely compare two private numbers without a trusted third-party. There have been several solutions to the problem, including Yao’s protocol [Yao, 1982] and Mix and Match [Jakobsson and Juels, 2000]. However, Yao’s Protocol is not secure in the malicious model and Mix and Match unnecessarily releases theoretically breakable encryptions of information about the data that is not needed for the comparison. In addition, neither protocol …

Privacy-Preserving Trajectory Data Publishing Via Differential Privacy, Ishita Dwivedi

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Over the past decade, the collection of data by individuals, businesses and government agencies has increased tremendously. Due to the widespread of mobile computing and the advances in location-acquisition techniques, an immense amount of data concerning the mobility of moving objects have been generated. The movement data of an object (e.g. individual) might include specific information about the locations it visited, the time those locations were visited, or both. While it is beneficial to share data for the purpose of mining and analysis, data sharing might risk the privacy of the individuals involved in the data. Privacy-Preserving Data Publishing (PPDP) …

Trace Chemical Evaluation Of Cloud Seeding In The Payette Basin, James Mitchell Fisher

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Glaciogenic cloud seeding increases the fraction of super cooled liquid water precipitating from a given storm. Orographic clouds tend to be inefficient at higher cloud temperatures due to the lack of active natural ice nuclei. Adding artificial ice nuclei active at temperatures greater than -12^oC (where most natural ice nuclei are inactive) may result in an increase in snow precipitation, especially in orographic clouds. Silver iodide (AgI) is typically the artificial nucleating agent for winter orographic cloud seeding. Recent estimates suggest the addition of AgI to orographic storm clouds enhance precipitation by 3 - 15%. However, the National …

If It Burns, Will It Flow? And About The Managers Who Would Like To Know: Predicting Post-Fire Debris Flows In The Rangeland Foothills Of Boise, Idaho & Investigating The Use Of Wildfire Science By Decision Makers At The Wildland Urban Interface, Katherine Gibble

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Wildfires increase erosion in mountainous landscapes. The most catastrophic form of post-fire erosion is the debris flow, viscous slurries of water and sediment capable of scouring and entraining larger sediment and rafting boulders. Post-fire debris flows are particularly hazardous when fire- and debris flow-prone landscapes intersect the Wildland Urban Interface (WUI). Homes built into the edge of the flammable WUI are at high risk of both wildfire and subsequent debris flows in mountainous landscapes of the western US, yet the WUI is expanding at an extraordinary rate. There are predictive models that inform citizens, land managers, and local governments of …

Investigating Hydrothermal And Radiation Effects On Nitrogen Heterocycles Relevant To Meteorite Parent Bodies, Phillip G. Hammer

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Organic compounds in meteorites were likely transformed by a variety of processes on the asteroid parent body including aqueous, thermal, and radiolytic alteration. Previous studies have identified a suite of purine nitrogen heterocycles in carbonaceous chondrites (a class of meteorites) and determined that their likely origin was due to cyanide chemistry. The thesis research described here consisted of two parts: investigating thermal effects on aqueous ammonium cyanide reactions and the production/survivability of organics (Chapter 2) and investigating gamma radiation effects on purine nitrogen heterocycles to understand how prolonged radiation exposure influenced the distribution and abundance of nitrogen heterocycles measured in …

Geophysical Investigations Of Pyroclastic Density Current Processes And Deposit Properties At Mount St. Helens, Washington (Usa), Andrew Cleveland Gase

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Geophysical imaging has the potential to significantly improve investigations in pyroclastic deposits, either as a means of in situ property estimation or to provide geologic context where exposures do not exist. I perform two geophysical studies set in the deposits of the 1980 eruption at Mount St. Helens, Washington (USA); the aim is to investigate the physical properties and geology of pyroclastic deposits.

Joint petrophysical modeling reveals the dependence of seismic and electromagnetic velocities in pyroclastic deposits on two-phase porosity (vesicularity and inter- granular porosity) and water-saturation. Seismic first arrival travel-time tomography, multi-channel analysis of surface waves, and multi-offset GPR …

Exploring The Impact Of Climate And Land Cover Change On Regional Hydrology In A Snowmelt-Dominated Watershed: The Upper Boise River Basin, Idaho, Amy Steimke

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Seasonally snow-dominated, mountainous watersheds supply water to many human populations globally. However, the timing and magnitude of water delivery from these watersheds has already and will continue to change as climate is altered. Associated changes in watershed vegetation cover further affect the runoff responses of watersheds, from altering evapotranspiration rates to changing surface energy fluxes, and there exists a need to incorporate land cover change in hydrologic modeling studies. However, few land cover projections exist at the scale needed for watershed studies, and current models may be unable to simulate key interactions that occur between land cover and hydrologic processes. …

Earthquake Segment Boundaries And Tsunamigenic Faults Of The Kodiak Segment, Alaska-Aleutian Subduction Zone, Marlon D. Ramos

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

The most recent megathrust earthquake to impact the Alaska subduction zone was the M9.2 Great Alaska earthquake of 1964. This multi-segment rupture spanned over 700 km of the plate boundary and engendered both local and trans-Pacific tsunamis. The Kodiak Islands region served as the southwestern limit to rupture. The nature of past megathrust segmentation for the Alaska subduction zone has been largely hypothesized through paleoseismological methods and the Kodiak region in particular has not received a comprehensive geophysical characterization of its inferred segment boundaries.

I analyze multiple geophysical datasets (e.g. seismic reflection, earthquake, potential fields) to understand the spatiotemporal relationships …

Using Mountain Snowpack To Predict Summer Water Availability In Semiarid Mountain Watersheds, Rebecca Dawn Garst

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

In the mountainous landscapes of the western United States, water resources are dominated by snowpack. As temperatures rise in spring and summer, the melting snow produces an increase in river flow levels. Reservoirs are used during this increase to retain surplus water, which is released to supplement growing season water supply once the peak flows decrease to below water demands. Once there is no longer surplus natural flow of water, the water accounting changes – referred to as the day of allocation (DOA), and water previously retained within the reservoir is used to supplement the lower flow levels. The amount …

Editable View Optimized Tone Mapping For Viewing High Dynamic Range Panoramas On Head Mounted Display, Yuan Li

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Head mounted displays are characterized by relatively low resolution and low dynamic range. These limitations significantly reduce the visual quality of photo-realistic captures on such displays. This thesis presents an interactive view optimized tone mapping technique for viewing large sized high dynamic range panoramas up to 16384 by 8192 on head mounted displays. This technique generates a separate file storing pre-computed view-adjusted mapping function parameters. We define this technique as ToneTexture. The use of a view adjusted tone mapping allows for expansion of the perceived color space available to the end user. This yields an improved visual appearance of …

A Stable Algorithm For Divergence-Free And Curl-Free Radial Basis Functions In The Flat Limit, Kathryn Primrose Drake

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Radial basis functions (RBFs) were originally developed in the 1970s for interpolating scattered topographic data. Since then they have become increasingly popular for other applications involving the approximation of scattered, scalar-valued data in two and higher dimensions, especially data collected on the surface of a sphere. In the late 2000s, matrix-valued RBFs were introduced for approximating divergence-free and curl-free vector fields on the surface of a sphere from scattered samples, which arise naturally in atmospheric and oceanic sciences. The intriguing property of these RBFs is that the resulting vector-valued approximations analytically preserve the divergence-free or curl-free properties of the field. …

Joint Inversion Of Compact Operators, James Ford

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

The first mention of joint inversion came in [22], where the authors used the singular value decomposition to determine the degree of ill-conditioning in inverse problems. The authors demonstrated in several examples that combining two models in a joint inversion, and effectively stacking discrete linear models, improved the conditioning of the problem. This thesis extends the notion of using the singular value decomposition to determine the conditioning of discrete joint inversion to using the singular value expansion to determine the well-posedness of joint linear operators. We focus on compact linear operators related to geophysical, electromagnetic subsurface imaging.

The operators are …

A Scalable Graph-Coarsening Based Index For Dynamic Graph Databases, Akshay Kansal

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Graph is a commonly used data structure for modeling complex data such as chemical molecules, images, social networks, and XML documents. This complex data is stored using a set of graphs, known as graph database D. To speed up query answering on graph databases, indexes are commonly used. State-of-the-art graph database indexes do not adapt or scale well to dynamic graph database use; they are static, and their ability to prune possible search responses to meet user needs worsens over time as databases change and grow. Users can re-mine indexes to gain some improvement, but it is time consuming. Users …

Multi-Rate Runge-Kutta-Chebyshev Time Stepping For Parabolic Equations On Adaptively Refined Meshes, Talin Mirzakhanian

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, we develop an explicit multi-rate time stepping method for solving parabolic equations on a one dimensional adaptively refined mesh. Parabolic equations are characterized by their stiffness and as a result are usually solved using implicit time stepping schemes [16]. However, implicit schemes have the disadvantage that they can be expensive in higher dimensions or complicated to implement on adaptive or otherwise non-uniform meshes. Moreover, for coupled systems of parabolic equations, it can be difficult to achieve the expected order of accuracy without using sophisticated operator splitting techniques. For these reasons, we seek to exploit the properties of …

Identification Of Unknown Landscape Types Using Cnn Transfer Learning, Ashish Sharma

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Unknown image type identification is the problem of identifying unknown types of images from the set of already provided images that are considered to be known, where the known and unknown sets represent different content types. Solving this problem has a lot of security applications such as suspicious object detection during baggage scanning at airport customs, border protection via remote sensing, cancer detection, weather and disaster monitoring, etc. In this thesis, we focus on identification of unknown landscape images. This application has a huge relevance to the context of a smart nation where it can be applied to major national …

The Classification Problem For Models Of Zfc, Samuel Dworetzky

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Models of ZFC are ubiquitous in modern day set theoretic research. There are many different constructions that produce countable models of ZFC via techniques such as forcing, ultraproducts, and compactness. The models that these techniques produce have many different characteristics; thus it is natural to ask whether or not models of ZFC are classifiable. We will answer this question by showing that models of ZFC are unclassifiable and have maximal complexity. The notions of complexity used in this thesis will be phrased in the language of Borel complexity theory.

In particular, we will show that the class of countable models …

Molecular Basis Of Substrate Recognition In Bjai, An Ahl Synthase From Bradyrhizobium Japonicum, Nicole Cornell

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Resistance to antibiotics has become a major challenge in today’s society for treating bacterial infections. Inhibition of quorum sensing has a potential to be a non-antibiotic based therapeutic that could be used to fight these bacterial infections. Quorum sensing is a cell density dependent, intercellular communication mechanism that bacteria use to synchronize behavior such as virulence and resistance to antibiotics. If this switch from planktonic to communal behavior can be inhibited, the bacteria will be less virulent. One possible way to accomplish this is by inhibiting the enzymes that are responsible for making the quorum sensing signaling molecules in Gram-negative …

Investigations On The Mesozoic Geologic And Tectonic History Of The Jackson Mountains, Northwest Nevada, Thomas Anthony Colby

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

New geologic mapping, high-precision U-Pb zircon geochronology, and isotope geochemistry provide insight into the early Mesozoic paleogeography and magmatic, stratigraphic, and structural evolution of the Jackson Mountains in the Black Rock Desert region of northwest Nevada. The magmatic history of the Jackson Mountains records Late Triassic to Early Jurassic (~215-195 Ma) marine deposition of the Boulder Creek Beds adjacent to the arc followed by the Early Jurassic (~193-189 Ma) eruption and emplacement of the Happy Creek Igneous Complex and associated plutons of the Early Mesozoic Intrusive Suite. Pb, Sr, and Nd isotopic data from Early Jurassic intrusive rocks of the …

Geochronology Of The Tectonic, Stratigraphic, And Magmatic Evolution Of Neoproterozoic To Early Paleozoic, North American Cordillera And Cryogenian Glaciation, Vincent H. Isakson

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Neoproterozoic sedimentary successions contain evidence for some of the most extreme climate fluctuations, breakup of the paleo-supercontinent Rodina, multiple low-latitude global glaciations, and the resultant evolution and radiation of complex life. The stratigraphic record of these events are found on all major continents and have been associated with, in part, global ‘Snowball Earth’ events. However, the understanding and integration of these, and related phenomenon, are limited by disparate and imprecise age constraints that prohibit clear correlation between locations.

This research focused on high-precision geochronology within an integrated framework of sedimentology, stratigraphy, and geochemistry to resolve the timing and duration of …

Simulation Of A Crossed-Field Amplifier Using A Modulated Distributed Cathode, Marcus Pearlman

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Current crossed-field amplifiers (CFAs) use a uniformly distributed electron beam, and in this work, the effects of using a spatially and temporally controlled electron source are simulated and studied. Spatial and temporal modulation of the electron source in other microwave vacuum electron devices have shown an increase in gain and efficiency over a continuous current source, and it is expected that similar progress will be made with CFAs. Experimentally, for accurate control over the electron emission profile, integration of gated field emitter arrays (GFEAs) as the distributed electron source in a crossed-field amplifier (CFA) is proposed.

Two linear format, 600 …

Hand Gesture Recognition For Sign Language Transcription, Iker Vazquez Lopez

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Sign Language is a language which allows mute people to communicate with other mute or non-mute people. The benefits provided by this language, however, disappear when one of the members of a group does not know Sign Language and a conversation starts using that language. In this document, I present a system that takes advantage of Convolutional Neural Networks to recognize hand letter and number gestures from American Sign Language based on depth images captured by the Kinect camera. In addition, as a byproduct of these research efforts, I collected a new dataset of depth images of American Sign Language …

Predicting Friendship Strength In Facebook, Nitish Dhakal

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Effective friend classification in Online Social Networks (OSN) has many benefits in privacy. Anything posted by the user in social networks like Facebook is distributed among all their friends. Although the user can select the manual option for their post-dissemination, it is not feasible every time. Since not all friends are the same in a social network, the visibility access for the post should be different for different strengths of friendship for privacy. We propose a model with 24 features for finding friendship strength in a social network like Facebook. Previous works in finding friendship strength in social networks have …

Hexarray: A Novel Self-Reconfigurable Hardware System, Fady Hussein

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Evolvable hardware (EHW) is a powerful autonomous system for adapting and finding solutions within a changing environment. EHW consists of two main components: a reconfigurable hardware core and an evolutionary algorithm. The majority of prior research focuses on improving either the reconfigurable hardware or the evolutionary algorithm in place, but not both. Thus, current implementations suffer from being application oriented and having slow reconfiguration times, low efficiencies, and less routing flexibility. In this work, a novel evolvable hardware platform is proposed that combines a novel reconfigurable hardware core and a novel evolutionary algorithm.

The proposed reconfigurable hardware core is a …