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Comparing Hurricane And Extratropical Storm Surge For The Mid- Atlantic And Northeast Coast Of The United States For 1979–2013, James F. Booth, H E Rieder, Y Kushnir

Publications and Research

This letter examines the magnitude, spatial footprint, and paths of hurricanes and extratropical cyclones (ETCs) that caused strong surge along the east coast of the US between 1979 and 2013. Lagrangian cyclone track information, for hurricanes and ETCs, is used to associate surge events with individual storms. First, hurricane influence is examined using ranked surged events per site. The fraction of hurricanes among storms associated with surge decreases from 20%–60% for the top 10 events to 10%–30% for the top 50 events, and a clear latitudinal gradient of hurricane influence emerges for larger sets of events. Secondly, surges on larger …

Sixteen Years Of Change In The Global Terrestrial Human Footprint And Implications For Biodiversity Conservation, Oscar Venter, Eric W. Sanderson, Ainhoa Magrach, James R. Allan, Jutta Beher, Kendall R. Jones, Hugh P. Possingham, William F. Laurance, Peter Wood, Balázs M. Fekete, Marc A. Levy, James E. M. Watson

Publications and Research

Human pressures on the environment are changing spatially and temporally, with profound implications for the planet’s biodiversity and human economies. Here we use recently available data on infrastructure, land cover and human access into natural areas to construct a globally standardized measure of the cumulative human footprint on the terrestrial environment at 1 km2 resolution from 1993 to 2009. We note that while the human population has increased by 23% and the world economy has grown 153%, the human footprint has increased by just 9%. Still, 75% the planet’s land surface is experiencing measurable human pressures. Moreover, pressures are perversely …

Data Descriptor: Global Terrestrial Human Footprint Maps For 1993 And 2009, Oscar Venter, Eric W. Sanderson, Ainhoa Magrach, James R. Allan, Jutta Beher, Kendall R. Jones, Hugh P. Possingham, William F. Laurance, Peter Wood, Balázs M. Fekete, Marc A. Levy, James E. M. Watson

Publications and Research

Remotely-sensed and bottom-up survey information were compiled on eight variables measuring the direct and indirect human pressures on the environment globally in 1993 and 2009. This represents not only the most current information of its type, but also the first temporally-consistent set of Human Footprint maps. Data on human pressures were acquired or developed for: 1) built environments, 2) population density, 3) electric infrastructure, 4) crop lands, 5) pasture lands, 6) roads, 7) railways, and 8) navigable waterways. Pressures were then overlaid to create the standardized Human Footprint maps for all non-Antarctic land areas. A validation analysis using scored pressures …

Polarized 3 Parton Production In Inclusive Dis At Small X, Alejandro Ayala, Martin Hentschinski, Jamal Jalilian-Marian, Maria Elena Tejeda-Yeomans

Publications and Research

Azimuthal angular correlations between produced hadrons/jets in high energy collisions are a sensitive probe of the dynamics of QCD at small x. Here we derive the triple differential cross section for inclusive production of 3polarized partons in DIS at small x. The target proton or nucleus is described using the Color Glass Condensate (CGC) formalism. The resulting expressions are used to study azimuthal angular correlations between produced partons in order to probe the gluon structure of the target hadron or nucleus. Our analytic expressions can also be used to calculate the real part of the Next to Leading Order (NLO) …

Anomaly Detection In Host Signaling Pathways For The Early Prognosis Of Acute Infection, Kun Wang, Stanley Langevin, Corey S. O'Hern, Mark D. Shattuck, Serenity Ogle, Adriana Forero, Juliet Morrison, Richard Slayden, Michael G. Katze, Michael Kirby

Publications and Research

Clinical diagnosis of acute infectious diseases during the early stages of infection is critical to administering the appropriate treatment to improve the disease outcome. We present a data driven analysis of the human cellular response to respiratory viruses including influenza, respiratory syncytia virus, and human rhinovirus, and compared this with the response to the bacterial endotoxin, Lipopolysaccharides (LPS). Using an anomaly detection framework we identified pathways that clearly distinguish between asymptomatic and symptomatic patients infected with the four different respiratory viruses and that accurately diagnosed patients exposed to a bacterial infection. Connectivity pathway analysis comparing the viral and bacterial diagnostic …

Electron Correlations In Local Effective Potential Theory, Viraht Sahni, Xiao-Yin Pan, Tao Yang

Publications and Research

Local effective potential theory, both stationary-state and time-dependent, constitutes the mapping from a system of electrons in an external field to one of the noninteracting fermions possessing the same basic variable such as the density, thereby enabling the determination of the energy and other properties of the electronic system. This paper is a description via Quantal Density Functional Theory (QDFT) of the electron correlations that must be accounted for in such a mapping. It is proved through QDFT that independent of the form of external field, (a) it is possible to map to a model system possessing all the basic …

Asymmetric Interiors For Small Black Holes, Daniel N. Kabat, Gilad Lifschytz

Publications and Research

We develop the representation of infalling observers and bulk fields in the CFT as a way to understand the black hole interior in AdS. We first discuss properties of CFT states which are dual to black holes. We then show that in the presence of a Killing horizon bulk fields can be decomposed into pieces we call ingoing and outgoing. The ingoing field admits a simple operator representation in the CFT, even inside a small black hole at late times, which leads to a simple CFT description of infalling geodesics. This means classical infalling observers will experience the classical geometry …

Ionophoric Polyphenols Selectively Bind Cu2+, Display Potent Antioxidant And Anti-Amyloidogenic Properties, And Are Non-Toxic Toward Tetrahymena Thermophila, Alberto Martinez, Ralph Alcendor, Tanzeen Rahman, Magdalena Podgorny, Ismaila Sanogo, Rebecca Mccurdy

Publications and Research

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is the most common form of dementia affecting more than 28 million people in the world. Only symptomatic treatments are currently available. Anticipated tri-fold increase of AD incidence in the next 50 years has established the need to explore new possible treatments. Accumulation of extracellular amyloid-b (Ab) plaques, intracellular tangles in the brain, and formation of reactive oxygen species (ROS) are the major hallmarks of the disease. The active role of some metal ions, especially Cu²⁺, in promoting both Ab aggregation and reactive oxygen species formation has rendered ionophoric drugs as a promising treatment strategy. …

Limiting Forms Of Iterated Circular Convolutions Of Planar Polygons, Boyan Kostadinov

Publications and Research

We consider a complex representation of an arbitrary planar polygon P centered at the origin. Let P(1) be the normalized polygon obtained from P by connecting the midpoints of its sides and normalizing the complex vector of vertex coordinates. We say that P(1) is a normalized average of P. We identify this averaging process with a special case of a circular convolution. We show that if the convolution is repeated many times, then for a large class of polygons the vertices of the limiting polygon lie either on an ellipse or on a star-shaped polygon. We derive a complete and …

A Study Of Integration: The Role Of Sensus Communis In Integrating Disciplinary Knowledge, Laureen Park

Publications and Research

Integration is an important notion for interdisciplinary studies. Achieving this shows that the interdisciplinary learner has successfully understood the commonalities among disciplines, as well as exercised crucial cognitive skills. This chapter attempts to elucidate how students integrated various disciplinary perspectives in the interdisciplinary course, Weird Science: Interpreting and Redefining Humanity. The study uses Hans-Georg Gadamer’s notion of the sensus communis to clarify how it was that students were processing and accomplishing the goal of integrating different disciplinary perspectives as evidenced in class observation, discussion, and especially student papers. The study demonstrates the ways in which common sense knowledge conditions and …

Creating Art Patterns With Math And Code, Boyan Kostadinov

Publications and Research

The goal of this talk is to showcase some visualization projects that we developed for a 3-day Code in R summer program, designed to inspire the creative side of our STEM students by engaging them with computational projects that we developed with the purpose of mixing calculus level math and code to create complex geometric patterns. One of the goals of this program was to attract more minority and female students into applied math and computer science majors.

The projects are designed to be implemented using the high-level, open-source and free computational environment R, a popular software in industry for …

Cultivating Minority Scientists: Undergraduate Research Increases Self-Efficacy And Career Ambitions For Underrepresented Students In Stem, Anthony Carpi, Darcy M. Ronan, Heather M. Falconer, Nathan H. Lents

Publications and Research

In this study, Social Cognitive Career Theory (SCCT) is used to explore changes in the career intentions of students in an undergraduate research experience (URE) program at a large public minority-serving college. Our URE model addresses the challenges of establishing an undergraduate research program within an urban, commuter, underfunded, Minority-Serving Institution (MSI). However, our model reaches beyond a focus on retention and remediation toward scholarly contributions and shifted career aspirations. From a student’s first days at the College to beyond their graduation, we have encouraged them to explore their own potential as scientists in a coordinated, sequential, and self-reflective process. …

Editorial: Learn, By Listening To The Child In Neoliberal Schools, Debbie Sonu, Julie Gorlewski, Daniel Vallée

Publications and Research

This Special Issue for the Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies emerged out of a disappointed search for literature on the experiences of neoliberal education as spoken by children and youth. While there is no shortage of work on the reverberations of market ideology within the structures, policies, and practices of schooling in the United States, an overwhelming majority of this is discussed through the reflective hindsight of the adult. Thus, we as editors, purposefully designed this issue to address the marginalization of a constituency who we believe can illuminate the state of schooling in ways that we as adults …

Collective Influence Algorithm To Find Influencers Via Optimal Percolation In Massively Large Social Media, Flaviano Morone, Byungjoon Min, Lin Bo, Romain Mari, Hernán A. Makse

Publications and Research

We elaborate on a linear-time implementation of Collective-Influence (CI) algorithm introduced by Morone, Makse, Nature 524, 65 (2015) to find the minimal set of influencers in networks via optimal percolation. The computational complexity of CI is O(N log N) when removing nodes one-by-one, made possible through an appropriate data structure to process CI. We introduce two Belief-Propagation (BP) variants of CI that consider global optimization via message-passing: CI propagation (CIP) and Collective- Immunization-Belief-Propagation algorithm (CIBP) based on optimal immunization. Both identify a slightly smaller fraction of influencers than CI and, remarkably, reproduce the exact analytical optimal percolation threshold obtained in …

Potyviral Genome-Linked Protein And Its Interaction With Plant Defense Ribosome Inactivating Protein From Phytolacca Americana, Artem V. Domashevskiy

Publications and Research

Agriculture is an indispensable part of every person’s life, ensuring that nutritious and inexpensive food is readily available. Agriculture continues to be confronted with epidemics, having devastating effects on economies and the plant sources essential for human and animal life. Plants and their pathogens have developed evolutionary adaptations, each shaping the other’s defence and invasive strategies. Many different plants produce toxic ribosome inactivating proteins that aid in their defence mechanisms against pathogenic invaders. Viruses must adapt to the host translational machinery, several having evolved to include viral genome-linked proteins that carry numerous viral functions. Here, we review how a potyviral …

A Genetic Algorithmic Approach To Automated Auction Mechanism Design, Jinzhong Niu, Simon Parsons

Publications and Research

In this paper, we present a genetic algorithmic approach to automated auction mechanism design in the context of \cat games. This is a follow-up to one piece of our prior work in the domain, the reinforcement learning-based grey-box approach. Our experiments show that given the same search space the grey-box approach is able to produce better auction mechanisms than the genetic algorithmic approach. The comparison can also shed light on the design and evaluation of similar search solutions to other domain problems.

Global Land Surface Emissivity Estimation From Amsr2 Observations, Satya Prakash, Hamid Norouzi, Marzieh Azarderakhsh, Reginald Blake, Kibrewossen Tesfagiorgis

Publications and Research

A reliable estimate of emissivity is critical for a wide range of applications for the atmosphere, the biosphere, the lithosphere, the cryosphere, and the hydrosphere. This study uses three years (August 2012 – July 2015) of data from the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer-2 (AMSR2) sensor that is onboard the Global Change Observation Mission 1st Water (GCOM-W1) satellite to explore estimates of instantaneous global land emissivity. A method is adopted to remove the known inconsistency in penetration depths between microwave brightness temperatures and infrared-based ancillary data that could cause differences between day and night emissivity estimates. After removing the diurnal atmospheric …

Should College Students Assessed As Needing Remedial Algebra Take College-Level Statistics Instead?, Alexandra W. Logue

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Uv Completions For Non-Critical Strings, Fabio Apruzzi, Falk Hassler, Jonathan J. Heckman, Ilarion V. Melnikov

Publications and Research

Compactifications of the physical superstring to two dimensions provide a general template for realizing 2D conformal field theories coupled to worldsheet gravity, i.e. non-critical string theories. Motivated by this observation, in this paper we determine the quasi-topological 8D theory which governs the vacua of 2D N = (0, 2) gauged linear sigma models (GLSMs) obtained from compactifications of type I and heterotic strings on a Calabi-Yau fourfold. We also determine the quasi-topological 6D theory governing the 2D vacua of intersecting 7-branes in compactifications of F-theory on an elliptically fibered Calabi-Yau fivefold, where matter fields and interaction terms localize on lower-dimensional …

Using Student-Developed Narratives To Improve Learning And Engagement In Computer Problem-Solving Courses, Candido Cabo, Reneta Lansiquot

Publications and Research

In our Computer Systems major, we require all students to take a problem-solving course (PS) to prepare them for subsequent courses in computer programming. As part of the PS course, students learn basic procedural programming concepts such as input, sequencing, selection (if/else), repetition (for and while loops), and output, using flowchart interpreters like Visual Logic (www.visuallogic.org). When trying to solve flowcharting problems, students have difficulty translating word problems into computer algorithms. Moreover, most problems proposed to students are closely related to mathematics and accounting, and our students are not well prepared in mathematics. Partly for this reason, students are often …

Burden Of Disease Resulting From Lead Exposure At Toxic Waste Sites In Argentina, Mexico And Uruguay, Jack Caravanos, Jonathan Carrelli, Russell Dowling, Brian Pavilonis, Bret Ericson, Richard Fuller

Publications and Research

Background: Though lead contaminated waste sites have been widely researched in many high-income countries, their prevalence and associated health outcomes have not been well documented in low- and middle-income countries.

Methods: Using the well-established health metric disability-adjusted life year (DALY) and an exposure assessment method developed by Chatham-Stephens et al., we estimated the burden of disease resulting from exposure to lead at toxic waste sites in three Latin American countries in 2012: Argentina, Mexico and Uruguay. Toxic waste sites identified through Pure Earth’s Toxic Sites Identification Program (TSIP) were screened for lead in both biological and environmental sample media. Estimates …

Should Students Assessed As Needing Remedial Mathematics Take College-Level Quantitative Courses Instead? A Randomized Controlled Trial, Alexandra W. Logue, Mari Watanabe, Daniel Douglas

Publications and Research

Many college students never take, or do not pass, required remedial mathematics courses theorized to increase college-level performance. Some colleges and states are therefore instituting policies allowing students to take college-level courses without first taking remedial courses. However, no experiments have compared the effectiveness of these approaches, and other data are mixed. We randomly assigned 907 students to (a) remedial elementary algebra, (b) that course with workshops, or (c) college-level statistics with workshops (corequisite remediation). Students assigned to statistics passed at a rate 16 percentage points higher than those assigned to algebra (p

Experimental Demonstration Of The Microscopic Origin Of Circular Dichroism In Two-Dimensional Metamaterials, Alexander B. Khanikaev, N. Arju, Z. Fan, D. Purtseladze, F. Lu, J. Lee, P. Sarriugarte, M. Schnell, R. Hillenbrand, M. A. Belkin, G. Shvets

Publications and Research

Optical activity and circular dichroism are fascinating physical phenomena originating from the interaction of light with chiral molecules or other nano objects lacking mirror symmetries in three-dimensional (3D) space. While chiral optical properties are weak in most of naturally occurring materials, they can be engineered and significantly enhanced in synthetic optical media known as chiral metamaterials, where the spatial symmetry of their building blocks is broken on a nanoscale. Although originally discovered in 3D structures, circular dichroism can also emerge in a two-dimensional (2D) metasurface. The origin of the resulting circular dichroism is rather subtle, and is related to non-radiative …

Should Students Assessed As Needing Remedial Mathematics Take College-Level Quantitative Courses Instead? A Randomized Controlled Trial, Alexandra W. Logue, Mari Watanabe-Rose, Daniel Douglas

Publications and Research

This data set is for Should Students Assessed as Needing Remedial Mathematics Take College-Level Quantitative Courses Instead? A Randomized Controlled Trial (Logue, Watanabe-Rose, & Douglas, 2016).

Floquet Topological Insulators For Sound, Romain Fleury, Alexander B. Khanikaev, Andrea Alu

Publications and Research

The unique conduction properties of condensed matter systems with topological order have recently inspired a quest for the similar effects in classical wave phenomena. Acoustic topological insulators, in particular, hold the promise to revolutionize our ability to control sound, allowing for large isolation in the bulk and broadband one-way transport along their edges, with topological immunity against structural defects and disorder. So far, these fascinating properties have been obtained relying on moving media, which may introduce noise and absorption losses, hindering the practical potential of topological acoustics. Here we overcome these limitations by modulating in time the acoustic properties of …

Significance Of Parameters Affecting The Performance Of A Passive Down-Draft Evaporative Cooling (Pdec) Tower With A Spray System, Daeho Kang, Richard K. Strand

Publications and Research

PDEC towers with spray systems are known to achieve substantial energy savings. Various parameters such as the wet-bulb depression, the tower height, and the wind speed have been known to be key factors affecting the performance of the system. To date, the significance of these parameters and other important factors have not been adequately treated in the literature. There also has been a lack of models that can successfully investigate potential benefits of the system under various conditions where this particular system could be applicable. To address these critical issues, this study performed a parametric analysis by using a FLUENT …

Arctic Cut-Off High Drives The Poleward Shift Of A New Greenland Melting Record, M. Tedesco, T. Mote, X. Fettweis, E. Hanna, J. Jeyaratnam, James F. Booth, R. Datta, K. Briggs

Publications and Research

Large-scale atmospheric circulation controls the mass and energy balance of the Greenland ice sheet through its impact on radiative budget, runoff and accumulation. Here, using reanalysis data and the outputs of a regional climate model, we show that the persistence of an exceptional atmospheric ridge, centred over the Arctic Ocean, was responsible for a poleward shift of runoff, albedo and surface temperature records over the Greenland during the summer of 2015. New records of monthly mean zonal winds at 500 hPa and of the maximum latitude of ridge peaks of the 5,700±50m isohypse over the Arctic were associated with the …

Spatial Heterogeneity Analysis In Evaluation Of Cell Viability And Apoptosis For Colorectal Cancer Cells, Aydin Saribudak, Herman Kucharavy, Karen Hubbard, Muharrem Umit Uyar

Publications and Research

In evaluation of cell viability and apoptosis, spatial heterogeneity is quantified for cancerous cells cultured in 3-D in vitro cell-based assays under the impact of anti-cancer agents. In 48-h experiments using human colorectal cancer cell lines of HCT-116, SW-620, and SW-480, incubated cells are divided into control and drug administered groups, to be grown in matrigel and FOLFOX solution, respectively. Our 3-D cell tracking and data acquisition system guiding an inverted microscope with a digital camera is utilized to capture bright field and fluorescent images of colorectal cancer cells at multiple time points. Identifying the locations of live and dead …

Atomistic Corrective Scheme For Supercell Density Functional Theory Calculations Of Charged Defects, Tengfei Cao, Angelo Bongiorno

Publications and Research

A new method to correct formation energies of charged defects obtained by supercell densityfunctional calculations is presented and applied to bulk, surface, and low-dimensional systems. The method relies on atomistic models and a polarizable force field to describe a material system and its dielectric properties. The polarizable force field is based on a minimal set of fitting parameters, it accounts for the dielectric screening arising from ions and electrons separately, and it can be easily implemented in any software for atomistic molecular dynamics simulations. This work illustrates both technical aspects and applications of the new corrective scheme. The method is …

An Early Assessment Of Medium Range Monsoon Precipitation Forecasts From The Latest High-Resolution Ncep-Gfs (T1534) Model Over South Asia, Satya Prakash, Imaranali M. Momin, Ashis K. Mitra, Partha S. Bhattacharjee, Fanglin Yang, Vijay Tallapragada

Publications and Research

Reliable prediction of the South Asian monsoon rainfall and its variability is crucial for various hydrological applications and early warning systems. The National Centers for Environmental Prediction – Global Forecast System (NCEP–GFS) is one of the popular global deterministic numerical weather prediction models, which is recently upgraded from T574 to T1534. In this paper, medium range monsoon precipitation forecasts from both the T1534 and T574 models are critically evaluated over the South Asia for the peak monsoon months (July and August) of 2015. Although both the versions of GFS model show similar large-scale monsoon rainfall patterns, the dry bias over …