Digital Commons Network^™

Quorum Based Ip Autoconfiguration In Mobile Ad Hoc Networks, Tinghui. Xu

Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2000 - 2009

IP address autoconfiguration poses a challenge for mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) because it has to be done to ensure correct routing. An IP autoconfiguration protocol that is based on quorum voting is proposed. Nodes are distributed configured when a write quorum can be collected. Making the compromise between message overhead and data consistency, quorum voting enforces data consistency by ensuring fresh read on every access so that each node is configured with a unique IP address. The protocol is scalable since the configuration information is maintained locally and no central server is involved. Extensive experiments are carried out comparing the …

Readability Analysis Of Elementary-Level Science Textbooks, Robyn Trainer

Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2000 - 2009

Given both the unprecedented attention to the importance of providing children with the best possible science textbooks and the overwhelming evidence that students in the United States are severely lacking the most basic science knowledge, the decline in the number of students pursuing science degrees is alarming. In spite of all the efforts being made, a disparity still exists between (1) the wealth of science information available, (2) the apparent ease of access to scientific information, and (3) the lack of scientific academic progress being made in classrooms across the United States. A literature review was conducted which included the …

The Technical Fix Or The Systemic Solution For Urban Water Quality? A Case Study Of Grassroots Activism On Behalf Of New York City's Drinking Water, Mirele B. Goldsmith

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This case study examines the activities of the Croton Watershed Clean Water Coalition from 1996 until 2004. The Coalition opposed construction of a filtration plant for the Croton water supply. The study traces the Coalition’s campaign against filtration, which took place in the context of the widely heralded New York City Watershed Memorandum of Agreement (1997). Although the Agreement permitted New York City to avoid filtration for its Catskill and Delaware water supplies, plans were laid for filtration of the Croton supply.

My study is informed by political ecology which provides a framework for understanding politics, practices and contradictions involved …

An Opera In Aid Of The Reading Of History, B. Mcevoy Campbell

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis consists of six chapters and a frontispiece/CD recording of a song cycle, Blue Orpheus: Hymns and Lullabies, written and performed by the author. This arrangement responds to currents within queer theory, which view questions concerning its historical and philosophical origins as diversions from its ability to determine present conditions, by reframing these "presentist" (and its close relative, "performative") orientations in terms of "place" and the corresponding laws and freedoms that originate from its cultivation—in politics, the art of memory, and systems theory and design. Generally speaking, to each concept of place I devote two chapters.

Chapter one …

Linking Interventions To Functional Behavior Assessment Results, Andrea Jo Duncan

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

A comprehensive review of the instructional, social, and physical dimensions and consequences of behavior that complete functional behavior assessments. Substantial explanation of each is accompanied with examples of research based interventions linking to each dimension. A new model of functional behavior assessment is described and piloted in a single subject case study design. Also included are the results of the case study.

Parallelization Of Multicategory Support Vector Machines (Pmc- Svm) For Classifying Microarray Data, Chaoyang Zhang, Peng Li, Arun Rajendran, Youping Deng, Dequan Chen

Faculty Publications

Background: Multicategory Support Vector Machines (MC-SVM) are powerful classification systems with excellent performance in a variety of data classification problems. Since the process of generating models in traditional multicategory support vector machines for large datasets is very computationally intensive, there is a need to improve the performance using high performance computing techniques.

Results: In this paper, Parallel Multicategory Support Vector Machines (PMC-SVM) have been developed based on the sequential minimum optimization-type decomposition method for support vector machines (SMO-SVM). It was implemented in parallel using MPI and C++ libraries and executed on both shared memory supercomputer and Linux cluster …

Maldi-Tof Baseline Drift Removal Using Stochastic Bernstein Approximation, Joseph Kolibal, Daniel Howard

Faculty Publications

Stochastic Bernstein (SB) approximation can tackle the problem of baseline drift correction of instrumentation data. This is demonstrated for spectral data: matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization time-of-flight mass spectrometry (MALDI-TOF) data. Two SB schemes for removing the baseline drift are presented: iterative and direct. Following an explanation of the origin of the MALDI-TOF baseline drift that sheds light on the inherent difficulty of its removal by chemical means, SB baseline drift removal is illustrated for both proteomics and genomics MALDI-TOF data sets. SB is an elegant signal processing method to obtain a numerically straightforward baseline shift removal method as it includes a …

Arch-Os V1.1 (Architecture Operating Systems), Software For Buildings, M Phillips, C Speed

School of Art, Design and Architecture

No abstract provided.

Easy Grocery: 3d Visualization In E-Grocery, J Somerville, Lj Stuart, N Barlow

School of Engineering, Computing and Mathematics

There are many deficiencies in the traditional electronic commerce schema. The main problem for consideration is the text and picture based design that underpins current HTML systems. This paper presents the online grocery shopping system called Easy Grocery which is available at www.easygrocery.co.uk. This system is based on the innovative concept of using a 3D system as an interface to the user during their shopping experience. Furthermore, this 3D system follows the mental model of the user as opposed to that of the developer. Additionally, the user is able to select the layout of the online store so that it …

Managing Fisheries Resources In Kaptai Reservoir, Bangladesh, Kku Ahmed, S Rahman, Su Ahammed

School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences

This paper examines the various challenges facing the development of fisheries resources in Kaptai reservoir, Bangladesh. The reservoir has undergone major changes in its catch composition since impoundment. Production records show a declining trend in the productivity of high-value fish. A host of managerial, socioeconomic and environmental factors are responsible for the underutilization of the reservoir's potential to provide high-value freshwater fish. These include deterioration of the natural breeding ground, environmental damage, poor implementation of regulations, inefficient fish farming technology and poor management practices. These constraints are discussed and possibilities for future improvements are suggested.

Satisficing Negotiations, Wynn C. Stirling, James K. Archibald, Jared C. Hill, F. Ryan Johnson

Faculty Publications

Negotiation procedures that are founded on the doctrine of individual rationality, where each participant is committed to maximizing its own satisfaction, are limited in their ability to accommodate the interests of others, and therefore, may unnecessarily constrain the negotiability of a decision maker, particularly in cooperative environments. Satisficing game theory provides a distinct alternative to the hyperrationality of conventional rational choice by waiving reliance on the individual rationality premise and offering an approach to negotiatory decision making that is based on a well-defined mathematical notion of satisficing, or being good enough, that permits the modeling of complex interrelationships between agents. …

Microwave Observations Of Daily Antarctic Sea-Ice Edge Expansion And Contraction Rates, David G. Long, Jeffrey R. Allen

Faculty Publications

Algorithms for estimating sea-ice extent from remotely sensed microwave sensor data can benefit from knowledge of the "a priori" distribution of the daily expansion and contraction of the sea-ice pack. To estimate the probability distribution of daily Antarctic sea-ice extent change, two independent sea-ice datasets are analyzed: sea-ice extent derived from the QuikSCAT scatterometer and ice concentration estimates from the Special Sensor Microwave/Imager. The daily sea-ice advance and retreat is tracked over a four-year period. The distribution of the daily sea-ice advance/retreat from each sensor is similar and is approximately double-exponential. Daily ice-pack statistics are presented.

Extending Taylor Plasticity Theory For Microscopic Slip Transfer Conditions, Brent L. Adams, Ray M. Merrill, John A. Basinger, Bassem S. El-Dasher

Faculty Publications

This work was supported primarily by the MRSEC Program of the National Science Foundation under DMR-0079996. Most studies in crystal plasticity are based upon Taylor's original 1938 work. Within Taylor's framework the dependence of yield strength on microstructure, beyond lattice orientation, is carried within the critical resolved shear stress for slip. Thus, as the grain size decreases, the critical resolved shear stress is required to increase. This increase in critical resolved shear stress is applied, uniformly across the entire interior of the slipping grains according to the basic assumption of the model (uniform plastic strain or strain rate). It is …

Cooperative Forest Fire Surveillance Using A Team Of Small Unmanned Air Vehicles, Randal Beard, David Casbeer, Derek Kingston, Timothy W. Mclain, Sai-Ming Li, Raman Mehra

Faculty Publications

This research was supported by NASA under STTR contract No. NNA04AA19C to Scientific Systems Company, Inc (SSCI) and Brigham Young University (BYU), and by AFOSR grants F49620-01-1-0091 and F49620-02-C- 0094. The objective of this paper is to explore the feasibility of using multiple low-altitude, short endurance (LASE) unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) to cooperatively monitor and track the propagation of large forest fires. A real-time algorithm for tracking the perimeter of a fire with an on-board infrared sensor is developed. Using this algorithm, we develop a decentralized multiple-UAV approach to monitoring the perimeter of the fire. The UAVs are assumed to …

Reducing Energy In Fpga Multipliers Through Glitch Reduction - Clock Power And Digit-Serial Addendum, Nathaniel Rollins, Michael J. Wirthlin

Faculty Publications

Sponsorship: NASA. In a previous paper it was shown that reducing the amount of glitches in digital designs can significantly reduce the amount of dynamic power consumption. Pipelined multipliers and a bit-serial multiplier design were used to show this. The paper failed to mention how much of the dynamic power consumption was due to the clock distribution. Also the only digit- serial multiplier digit size investigated was a digit size of 1. This paper addresses the issue of dynamic clocking power and includes results of digit-serial multipliers with larger digit sizes.