Digital Commons Network^™

Managing The Acidity Of Abandoned Water Filled Coal Mining Voids In Collie (Western Australia) Using Organic Matter, Scott A. Thompson

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

The effectiveness of using organic matter additions to increase pH in abandoned water filled coal mining voids in Collie was investigated. Previous studies have demonstrated that passing acidic drainage through organic matter increased the waters pH. Laboratory trials using intact sediment cores (collected from Ewington, Collie, Western Australia) were used to assess the effects of additions of hay, manure and mulched vegetation on pH, nutrients an sulphate levels. In a series of experiments the effect of different quantities of organic material, sulphate reducing bacterial inoculations and alkalinity generation were measured. A subsequent field experiment was conducted to examine the impact …

Development Of Self-Adaptive Back Propagation And Derivative Free Training Algorithms In Artificial Neural Networks, Shamsuddin Ahmed

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

Three new iterative, dynamically self-adaptive, derivative-free and training parameter free artificial neural network (ANN) training algorithms are developed. They are defined as self-adaptive back propagation, multi-directional and restart ANN training algorithms. The descent direction in self-adaptive back propagation training is determined implicitly by a central difference approximation scheme, which chooses its step size according to the convergence behavior of the error function. This approach trains an ANN when the gradient information of the corresponding error function is not readily available. The self- adaptive variable learning rates per epoch are determined dynamically using a constrained interpolation search. As a result, appropriate …

Development, Management And Economy Of Show Caves, Arrigo A. Cigna, Ezio Burri

International Journal of Speleology

The problems concerning the development of show caves are here considered by taking into account different aspects of the problem. A procedure to carry out an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) has been established in the last decade and it is now currently applied. Such an assessment starts with a pre-operational phase to obtain sufficient information on the undisturbed status of a cave to be developed into a show cave. Successively a programme for its development is established with the scope to optimise the intervention on the cave at the condition that its basic environmental parameters are not irreversibly modified. The …

The Influence Of Cave Tourism On Co2 And Temperature In Baiyun Cave, Hebei, China, Linhua Song, Wei Xiaoning, Liang Fuyuan

International Journal of Speleology

Baiyun Cave in Hebei Province is one of the main show caves in North China. The speleothem landscape is wonderful, but strongly weathered. In order to set up the relationship between visitor flow and CO₂ content and temperature, these parameters were measured at observation sites No. 1 and No. 2 in the tourist peak period of May Day Holiday from May 1 to May 7, 2000. and general tourist season August and October, 2000. The results show that visitor flow strongly affects the fluctuations of cave CO₂ content and temperature, that the cave topography and dimensions affect the …

New Rare Cave Minerals From The Perolas-Santana Karst System (São Paulo State, Brazil), Paolo Forti, Ermanno Galli, Antonio Rossi

International Journal of Speleology

The Perolas-Santana karst system (São Paulo State, Brazil) has been partially studied from the mineralogical point of view. The present paper will contribute to the knowledge of the minerals in these caves, describing the occurrence of euhedral celestite crystals and of a rather rare mineral for a cavern environment: lithiophorite. Thanks to these new discoveries the Perolas-Santana karst system becomes one of the most important in Brazil from a mineralogical point of view. Finally, the result of the chemical analyses carried out on this newly discovered Monoxyhydroxide put in evidence a zonation in the distribution of the different elements which …

The Freshman Connection: Implementing And Assessing A Plan To Increase Student Success, Pamela Downing-Hosten

Abraham S. Fischler College of Education ETD Archive

The purpose of this practicum was to develop, implement, and assess a plan for reducing the number of freshmen at the high school who failed the grade, with failure being defined as the inability to earn 4 credits within 1 year. From the 1993-1994 school year until the 1997-1998 school year, an average of 17.7% of the 9th-grade class had to repeat the grade. Through the year-long implementation of the plan called the Freshman Connection program, the researcher hoped that the failure rate of 21.9% in 1998 would be reduced to 10.0% in 1999.

The Freshman Connection program entailed (a) …

Mobile Agents: Motivations And State-Of-The-Art Systems, Robert S. Gray, George Cybenko, David Kotz, Daniela Rus

Dartmouth Scholarship

A mobile agent is an executing program that can migrate, at times of its own choosing, from machine to machine in a heterogeneous network. On each machine, the agent interacts with stationary service agents and other resources to accomplish its task. In this chapter, we first make the case for mobile agents, discussing six strengths of mobile agents and the applications that benefit from these strengths. Although none of these strengths are unique to mobile agents, no competing technique shares all six. In other words, a mobile-agent system provides a single general framework in which a wide range of distributed …