Digital Commons Network^™

A Short Tutorial On Reconstructability Analysis, Martin Zwick

Complex Systems Faculty Publications and Presentations

This talk will present the basic ideas of Reconstructability Analysis. RA is a general modeling methodology developed in the systems community since the early 60s (pioneered by Ross Ashby) for exploratory (data mining, machine learning) and confirmatory modeling. RA is based in graph theory, set theory, information theory, and statistics. It is applicable to qualitative (nominal) and, via binning, to quantitative (continuous) data, with both statistical & non-statistical applications. It overlaps and augments more widely known methods, e.g., log-linear modeling and Bayesian networks.

Keywords: Reconstructability Analysis, Log-Linear Modeling, categorical data, multivariate statistics, exploratory modeling, confirmatory modeling

Comparison Of Risk Management Policies In Oecd Countries, Reza Lahidji

Geohazards

The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development started in 2003 a series of country studies and reviews aimed at assisting its Member countries in evaluating the effectiveness of their risk management systems, notably in terms of their ability to contend with large-scale risks of the future, and at offering them guidance in making the requisite improvements. The project, entitled the OECD Futures Project on Risk Management Policies, focuses on the consistency of risk management policies and on their ability to deal with the challenges, present and future, created by the evolution of the risk landscape.

The Project gathers eight Member …

Integrating Physical Accessibility Of Emergency Establishments Into Earthquake Risk Assessment, Kivanc Ertugay, Sebnem Duzgun

Geohazards

Human being has always been in a continual struggle with disasters. They are mostly sudden and unexpected and cause irreversible damages to human life and property. Disasters are facts of life, but it is always possible to decrease the effects of disasters by preparedness. In disaster case, accessibility is one of the most vital and important components of disaster preparedness and mean the difference between loosing a life or saving a life. That is why emergency accessibility, regardless if it is measured in time, distance, population or any other cost, is the most important variable that decision makers must consider …

Integrated Natural Disaster Risk Assessment: The Socio-Economic Dimension Of Earthquake Risk In The Urban Area, Sibel Kalaycioglu, Helga Rittersberger-Tilic, Kezban Celik, Fatime Günes

Geohazards

Understanding and formulation of risk of a natural disaster requires consideration of every aspect of risk, which can be handled by development of integrated approaches. In such integrated approaches, several discipline’s views are incorporated into risk assessment to see the whole picture. Hence, the risk which can be experienced before and / or after a natural disaster should be a common concern for both natural and social disciplines and should be handled through a interdisciplinary approach. A field research was conducted with 1500 households, selected through stratified random sampling, using the database obtained from the Eskisehir Greater Metropolitan Municipality. Interviews …

Landslide Hazard Assessment At “Sakhalin-2” Main Pipeline Project, S. I. Matsiy, A. P. Sheglov, D. V. Pleshakov

Geohazards

In the given article, 2 various approaches to a landslide hazard assessment are considered. Landslide hazard means probability of a slope failure. The calculations have been carried out using a landslide hazardous section of Sakhalin-2 main pipeline route as an example.

On The Acceptable Risk For Structures Subjected To Geohazards, D. Diamantidis, S. Duzgun, F. Nadim, M. Wöhrle

Geohazards

Geohazards such as earthquakes or landslides represent a major risk to structures. In this contribution risk acceptance criteria for structures subjected to geohazards are reviewed. Especially the implementation of human safety and cost benefit considerations are discussed. Current trends in the definition of target safety criteria for structures subjected to earthquakes and landslides are presented and conclusions regarding codified criteria are drawn.

Tsunami Relief Work - Biopesticide Spray Operations - A Case Study, Kadarkarai Murugan

Geohazards

Tsunami occurred on 26th December, 2004 and in India more than 8000 people were killed due to the massive attack. The worst affected districts in Tamil Nadu were Viz., Velankanni, Nagapattinam and Cuddalore, Tamil Nadu, India. Official sources said that due to massive death of animals and human beings, the public health has been affected/spoiled and it will cause further outbreak of infectious diseases like diarrhea, cholera and mosquito transmitting diseases. After a week there were incidents of outbreak of mosquito transmitting diseases such as malaria, and dengue. Tsunami had caused a mixing of animal debris in the breeding ground …

On Tsunami Risk Assessment For The West Coast Of Thailand, Farrokh Nadim, Thomas Glade

Geohazards

The catastrophic Indian Ocean tsunami of 26 December 2004 raised a number of questions for scientists and politicians on how to deal with the tsunami risk in coastal regions. This paper discusses the challenges in tsunami risk evaluation and presents the results of a tsunami risk mitigation study for the west coast of Thailand. It is argued that a scenario-based approach is particularly well suited for evaluation of the risk posed by tsunamis. The approach consists of considering scenarios of plausible extreme, tsunami-generating events, computing the tsunami inundation levels caused by these events, estimating the possible range of casualties for …

Curricula To Educate The 2020 Mse Engineering Professional: Simple But Powerful Changes In The Way That Mse Is Taught, Linda Vanasupa, Blair London, Katherine C. Chen, Richard Savage

Materials Engineering

National leaders in science and technology sectors speak in unison as they call for engineers who are not only technically competent in their fields, but who possess the abilities to communicate well, to work on teams, to apply systems thinking, to operate in the global business environment, to design within a greater set of constraints (environmental, health and safety, sustainability, economic, societal, political, manufacturability, and ethical). In short, our challenge is to educate an engineering professional who is far more sophisticated than the engineer of the 20^th century. Additionally, challenges brought on by the overuse of natural resources put …

The 1999 Colorado Springs, Colorado Landslides – Federal, State And Local Government Response; Public Involvement; And Future Long-Term Risks And Challenges, Mark W. Squire

Geohazards

In the spring of 1999, heavy rain precipitated landslides in over 12 developed areas in Colorado Springs. The landslide damage and destruction exceeded $80 million dollars. A combined federal, state and local response included active participation by property owners in an open and transparent public process. The resulting federally funded mitigation project was a success, but this can only be considered an interim objective for an inherent serious local problem. Colorado Springs is normally an arid environment but high moisture years, like 1999, can result in activation of new landslides and reactivation of existing landslides. Residential neighborhoods continue to expand …

Alterations In Regional Vascular Geometry Produced By Theoretical Stent Implantation Influence Distributions Of Wall Shear Stress: Analysis Of A Curved Coronary Artery Using 3d Computational Fluid Dynamics Modeling, John F. Ladisa, Lars E. Olson, Douglas Anthony Hettrick, David C. Warltier, Judy R. Kersten, Paul S. Pagel

Biomedical Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

Background

The success of stent implantation in the restoration of blood flow through areas of vascular narrowing is limited by restenosis. Several recent studies have suggested that the local geometric environment created by a deployed stent may influence regional blood flow characteristics and alter distributions of wall shear stress (WSS) after implantation, thereby rendering specific areas of the vessel wall more susceptible to neointimal hyperplasia and restenosis. Stents are most frequently implanted in curved vessels such as the coronary arteries, but most computational studies examining blood flow patterns through stented vessels conducted to date use linear, cylindrical geometric models. It …

Dissociation Of Automatic And Strategic Lexical-Semantics: Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Evidence For Differing Roles Of Multiple Frontotemporal Regions, Brian T. Gold, David A. Balota, Sara J. Jones, David K. Powell, Charles D. Smith, Anders H. Andersen

Neuroscience Faculty Publications

Behavioral research has demonstrated three major components of the lexical-semantic processing system: automatic activation of semantic representations, strategic retrieval of semantic representations, and inhibition of competitors. However, these component processes are inherently conflated in explicit lexical-semantic decision tasks typically used in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) research. Here, we combine the logic of behavioral priming studies and the neurophysiological phenomenon of fMRI priming to dissociate the neural bases of automatic and strategic lexical-semantic processes across a series of three studies. A single lexical decision task was used in all studies, with stimulus onset asynchrony or linguistic relationship between prime and …

Solution Chemistry Control To Make Well Defined Submicron Continuous Fibres By Electrospinning: The (Ch3ch2ch2o)4ti/Acoh/Poly(N-Vinylpyrrolidone) System, Gustavo F. Larsen, Maciej Skotak

Papers in Materials Science

The (CH3CH2CH2O)4Ti/AcOH/poly(N-vinylpyrrolidone) system has been shown to yield suitable formulations for electrohydrodynamic (EHD) processing into continuous fibres and particles. The EHD processability of this, and generally most sol–gel-based formulations, into well defined fibres and particles with narrow submicron-range diameter distributions depends not only on the EHD process variables (electric field and flow rates), but also on the stability of key physical properties (e.g., conductivity, viscosity, surface tension, density and dielectric constant) of the sol over time. Sols that were almost certainly still undergoing hydrolysis and condensation reactions have been processed via EHD by many research groups to make materials with …

Poisoning And Sulfation On Vanadia Scr Catalyst, Xiaoyu Guo

Theses and Dissertations

Deactivation of titania-supported vanadia commercial SCR catalysts exposed to flue gases from both coal and coal-biomass co-firing boilers were investigated. BET surface area and average pore diameter measurements on both fresh and exposed commercial catalyst samples indicated pore plugging occurred to exposed catalyst samples. ESEM analyses showed fouling on catalyst surface, and poison deposition on both catalyst surface and inner pores. Activity assessments of commercial monolith catalysts with various exposures (time and fuel type) indicated that catalyst deactivation involves fouling, pore plugging, and poisoning. Different mechanisms may dominate depending on exposure time, catalyst properties, and combustion environment. Better controlled lab-scale …

Imaging Breast Adipose And Fibroglandular Tissue Molecular Signatures By Using Hybrid Mri-Guided Near-Infrared Spectral Tomography, Ben Brooksby, Brian W. Pogue, Shudong Jiang, Hamid Dehghani, Subhadra Srinivasan, Christine Kogel, Tor D. Tosteson, John Weaver, Steven P. Poplack, Keith D. Paulsen

Dartmouth Scholarship

Magnetic resonance (MR)-guided near-infrared spectral tomography was developed and used to image adipose and fibroglandular breast tissue of 11 normal female subjects, recruited under an institutional review board-approved protocol. Images of hemoglobin, oxygen saturation, water fraction, and subcellular scattering were reconstructed and show that fibroglandular fractions of both blood and water are higher than in adipose tissue. Variation in adipose and fibroglandular tissue composition between individuals was not significantly different across the scattered and dense breast categories. Combined MR and near-infrared tomography provides fundamental molecular information about these tissue types with resolution governed by MR T1 images.

Investigation Of Corrosion Effects On Bond-Slip And Tensile Strength Of Reinforced Concrete Members, M. A. Shayanfar, Amir Safiey, M. Ghalehnovi

Publications

The corrosion effect on tensile strength of RC members is very important to region with high corrosion conditions. In this article a study on finding bond behaviour, crack pattern, crack spacing, and tensile strength of RC members is presented. For this purpose a comprehensive experimental program including reinforced concrete cylanders with different concrete covers and reinforcement ratios under various corrosion rates is conducted. The specimens are located in large tub containing water and salt (5% salt solution) with a devich for accelerated corrosion production. For each specimen, the variation of total tensile strength versus its average strain is plotted and …

Climate Scenarios For California, Edwin P. Maurer, Michael Dettinger, Daniel Cayan, Mary Tyree, Katherine Hayhoe, Celine Bonfils, Philip B. Duffy, Benjamin Santer

Civil, Environmental and Sustainable Engineering

Possible future climate changes in California are investigated from a varied set of climate change model simulations. These simulations, conducted by three state-of-the-art global climate models, provide trajectories from three greenhouse gas (GHG) emission scenarios. These scenarios and the resulting climate simulations are not “predictions,” but rather are a limited sample from among the many plausible pathways that may affect California’s climate. Future GHG concentrations are uncertain because they depend on future social, political, and technological pathways, and thus the IPCC has produced four “families” of emission scenarios. To explore some of these uncertainties, emissions scenarios A2 (a medium-high emissions) …

Measuring Privacy Loss In Statistical Databases, Vinod Chirayath, Luc Longpre, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Protection of privacy in databases has become of increasing importance. While a number of techniques have been proposed to query databases while preserving privacy of individual records in the database, very little is done to define a measure on how much privacy is lost after statistical releases. We suggest a definition based on information theory. Intuitively, the privacy loss is proportional to how much the descriptional complexity of a record decreases relative to the statistical release. There are some problems with this basic definition and we suggest ways to address these problems.

Competitive Metagenomic Dna Hybridization Identifies Host-Specific Microbial Genetic Markers In Cow Fecal Samples, Orin C. Shanks, Jorge W. Santo Domingo, Regina Lamendella, Catherine A. Kelty, James E. Graham

United States Environmental Protection Agency: Publications

Several PCR methods have recently been developed to identify fecal contamination in surface waters. In all cases, researchers have relied on one gene or one microorganism for selection of host-specific markers. Here we describe the application of a genome fragment enrichment (GFE) method to identify host-specific genetic markers from fecal microbial community DNA. As a proof of concept, bovine fecal DNA was challenged against a porcine fecal DNA background to select for bovine-specific DNA sequences. Bioinformatic analyses of 380 bovine enriched metagenomic sequences indicated a preponderance of Bacteroidales-like regions predicted to encode membrane-associated and secreted proteins. Oligonucleotide primers capable …

How To Measure Loss Of Privacy, Luc Longpre, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

To compare different schemes for preserving privacy, it is important to be able to gauge loss of privacy. Since loss of privacy means that we gain new information about a person, it seems natural to measure the loss of privacy by the amount of information that we gained. However, this seemingly natural definition is not perfect: when we originally know that a person's salary is between $10,000 and $20,000 and later learn that the salary is between $10,000 and $15,000, we gained exactly as much information (one bit) as when we learn that the salary is an even number -- …

Recyclability Index For Automobiles, Alexander Tsuji, Yarrow Nelson, Andrew Kean, Samuel A. Vigil

Civil and Environmental Engineering

A rating system was developed to quantify the environmental impacts of light-duty motor vehicles at the end of their life-cycle based on recyclability, toxic material content and ultimate disposal. Each year, 10-11 million vehicles are retired from service in the United States. The vehicle material not recycled is called automotive shredder residue (ASR). About 4.5 to 5 million tons of ASR are disposed in U.S. solid waste landfills annually. The volume of this residue is likely to increase as vehicle manufacturers continue to use more plastics and composites in their designs to reduce weight and increase fuel efficiency. The rating …

Plotting A Bright Future For Manufacturing Education: Results Of A Brainstorming Session, Daniel Waldorf, Sema E. Alptekin, Robert Bjurman

Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

Manufacturing industries worldwide have undergone dramatic changes in recent years and now demand more from graduating manufacturing engineers. The effects of globalization have forever changed the parameters for success in manufacturing. Our educational institutions must respond to these changes with innovation. That agenda formed the basis for a special SME/CIRP international conference on manufacturing engineering education called “Looking Forward: Innovations in Manufacturing Engineering Education,” held in San Luis Obispo, California, June 22-25, 2005. At the meeting, manufacturing education professionals from around the world came together to share their own innovative ideas and to brainstorm ways to shape the future of …

Real-Time Identification Of Sliding Friction Using Labview Fpga, Laine Mears, Jeannie S. Falcon, Thomas R. Kurfess

Publications

Friction is present in all mechanical systems, and can greatly affect system stability and control in precision motion applications. In this paper, we present application of a frictional model to trajectory planning of a part centering system with real-time identification of model parameters through system force and position response. This identification is carried out using LabVIEW motion control software and digital signal processing (DSP) and field-programmable gate array (FPGA) hardware. A comparison of hardware performance for force measurement is also made.

Helicopter Flight Operational Quality Assurance (Hfoqa): Development Of Hfoqa Analysis Software, Sergio Teixeira

Master's Theses - Daytona Beach

Flight Operational Quality Assurance (FOQA), or Flight Data Monitoring (FDM), has benefited flight safety in both fixed-wing and helicopter operations. The relative youth of FOQA programs has resulted in their minimal application among the helicopter fleets of the world; thus, Helicopter FOQA (HFOQA) has merited consolidation and expansion. This mixed methods design developed HFOQA analysis software via a blend of the qualitative data from helicopter and FOQA experts with quantitative data represented by a sample of de-identified digital flight data from 1,014 helicopter flights. Development of the software emphasized three domains of interest: (a) helicopter flight phases; (b) helicopter operational …

Wright State University College Of Engineering And Computer Science Bits And Pcs Newsletter, Volume 22, Number 8, June 2006, College Of Engineering And Computer Science, Wright State University

BITs and PCs Newsletter

An eight page newsletter created by the Wright State University College of Engineering and Computer Science that addresses the current affairs of the college.

Evaluation Of Microbial Diversity In Wetland Through Polymerase Chain Reaction (Pcr) And Restriction Fragment Length Polymorphism (Rflp), Gregory K. Joseph

Theses and Dissertations

The diversity of microbial communities in wetlands has not been fully measured. These communities may offer tools to naturally remediate sites polluted with chlorinated compounds. Polmerase Chain Reaction (PCR) and Restriction Fragment Length Polymorphism (RFLP) are genomic techniques that are capable of rapidly characterizing bacteria communities and can provide valuable information about the diversity of microbial communities.

Mitigating Insider Threat Using Human Behavior Influence Models, Anthony J. Puleo

Theses and Dissertations

Insider threat is rapidly becoming the largest information security problem that organizations face. With large numbers of personnel having access to internal systems, it is becoming increasingly difficult to protect organizations from malicious insiders. The typical methods of mitigating insider threat are simply not working, primarily because this threat is a people problem, and most mitigation strategies are geared towards profiling and anomaly detection, which are problematic at best. As a result, a new type of model is proposed in this thesis, one that incorporates risk management with human behavioral science. The new risk-based model focuses on observable influences that …

Explant Analysis Of Total Disc Replacement, Paul A. Anderson, Steven M. Kurtz, Jeffrey M. Toth

Biomedical Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

Explant analysis of human disc prostheses allow early evaluation of the host response to the prosthesis and the response of the prosthesis from the host. Furthermore, early predictions of failure and wear can be obtained. Thus far, about 2-3% of disc prostheses have been removed. Observed wear patterns are similar to that of appendicular prostheses including abrasions/scratching, burnishing, surface deformation, fatigue, and embedded debris. Chemically the polymeric components have shown little degradation in short-term implantation. In metal on metal prostheses the histologic responses consist of large numbers of metallic particles with occasional macrophages and giant cells. Only rare cases of …

Bs News

Building Services Engineering

No abstract provided.

Methane Production In A 100-L Upflow Bioreactor By Anaerobic Digestion Of Farm Waste, Abhijeet P. Borole, K. Thomas Klasson, Whitney Ridenour, Justin Holland, Khursheed Karim, Muthanna H. Al-Dahhan

Chemical and Biochemical Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Manure Waste from Dairy Farms Has Been Used for Methane Production for Decades, However, Problems Such as Digester Failure Are Routine. the Problem Has Been Investigated in Small Scale (1-2 L) Digesters in the Laboratory; However, Very Little Scale-Up to Intermediate Scales Are Available. We Report Production of Methane in a 100-L Digester and the Results of an Investigation into the Effect of Partial Mixing Induced by Gas Upflow/recirculation in the Digester. the Digester Was Operated for a Period of About 70 D (With 16-D Hydraulic Retention Time) with and Without the Mixing Induced by Gas Recirculation through an Internal …