Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Euclidian Geometry: Proposed Lesson Plans To Teach Throughout A One Semester Course, Joseph Willert

Mathematics Undergraduate Theses

Overview We provide several engaging lesson plans that would aid in the teaching of geometry, specifically targeting Euclidian Geometry, towards students of high school age. The audience of this piece would be high school or college students who have not yet had an introduction to geometry, but have completed the standard mathematical courses leading up to this point (i.e. algebra, elementary math, etc.). This being the case the lessons and concepts realized in Chapter 1 target a basic understanding of what Euclidian Geometry is and the subsequent chapters aim specifically at underlying properties of a geometry. The main source of …

Pythagorean Theorem Area Proofs, Rachel Morley

Mathematics Undergraduate Theses

This composition is intended to walk the reader through four proofs of the pythagorean theorem that are based on area. It could be used in a classroom to solidify the pythagorean theorem after studying Neutral and Euclidean Geometries.

Cross-Scale Interactions Between Atmospheric And Hydrologic Processes In A Topographically Complex, Snow-Dominated Watershed As Revealed Through An Integrated Hydrologic Model, Miguel A. Aguayo Arias

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

In much of the world, water for agricultural, domestic, and hydroelectric power generation uses are derived from snow-dominated mountain basins. In these regions, water management requires accurate and timely knowledge of runoff generation by snowmelt. This information is used to plan reservoir releases for downstream users and is generated by models of biophysical processes associated with varying degrees of fidelity to physical processes and/or spatial heterogeneities. The large variability in the characteristic spatial and temporal scales of atmospheric forcings, land-surface water and energy balance, and groundwater flow contribute to significant uncertainties in resolved hydrologic states and fluxes. Underlying sources of …

Pressure Waves And Tephra Dispersal From Volcanic Explosions: Models, Observations, And Instrumentation, Jacob Fortner Anderson

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Real-time study of erupting vents is important for both monitoring and scientific purposes; because direct in-situ study of erupting vents is impractical, our best tools for studying eruptions in real time involve monitoring eruptive products and waves that travel far from the volcano. The atmosphere is a particularly advantageous medium for studying propagation and transport of volcanic waves and products: acoustic waves pass through it with minimal scattering, particles follow predictable trajectories, and the atmospheric structure that affects both is well-monitored. Analyses of acoustic waves and tephra deposits can provide important information on eruptions including total explosive energy, volume, and …

Stable Isotope Geochemistry Of Bioapatite, Amanda E. Drewicz

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

The Cenozoic Era was a time period where dynamic shifts in climate created for both warm-wet greenhouse environments of the mid-Miocene Climatic Optimum (MMCO), and cool-dry, glacial periods of the late Pleistocene. The Cenozoic is close to our own time period, and although past climate reconstructions cannot be used as direct analogs for future climate change, understanding previous environmental responses can help inform policy surrounding future climate change. Presented here are climate reconstructions of the interior western United States, from two different geologic time periods. Each had a different climate, that differed greatly from modern day environments. The use of …

Crustal Composition Beneath Southern Idaho: Insights From Teleseismic Receiver Functions, Thomas Branson Harper

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Receiver functions derived from teleseismic earthquakes contain seismic amplitude and velocity information that relate to compositional changes within the Earth’s crust and upper mantle. The receiver function waveform is a combination of P-S converted waves that have reverberated within the lithosphere. Although the largest seismic velocity boundary is found at the base of the crust, I explore the use of lower amplitude receiver function arrivals that represent smaller velocity contrasts within the crust. In my thesis, I calculate and model receiver functions via a Metropolis algorithm approach to extract seismic velocity distributions in the lithosphere. I use the results to …

Investigating The Annual Water Balance Of A High-Altitude Watershed Using Near-Real Time Lidar Data Integration Into A Physically Based Snowmelt Model, Andrew R. Hedrick

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Knowledge of the amount of water stored in the mountain snowpack is crucial for flood prevention, drought mitigation, and energy production in the Western United States. In modeling terms, the most important component of the hydrologic water balance is the precipitation input to the system. Determining where and how much precipitation falls in mountain catchments, however, is the most difficult problem with regards to closing the water balance. The work presented in this dissertation details the modeling portion of the NASA Airborne Snow Observatory (ASO) using the iSnobal physically based snow model. This combination of remote sensing and modeling at …

Correlating The Spatial Distribution Of Snow Depth To Forest Canopy Parameters Derived From Terrestrial Laser Scans, Zachary Uhlmann

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

In nonpolar, cold climate zones, snow accounts for 17% of the total terrestrial water storage. Estimating the amount of water stored in a snowpack, the snow water equivalent (SWE), and its spatial distribution is crucial to providing water managers with parameters to predict runoff timing, duration and amount. Reservoir management, hydropower and flood forecasting depend on SWE estimates. While landscape features such as aspect and slope are dominant controls on radiative energy in non-forested areas, forest cover can shift the energy balance composition from turbulent exchange in exposed, windy sites to primarily radiative inputs in the subcanopy. Additionally, forest cover …

Volcano Infrasound Monitoring With Applications For Statistical Forecasting Of Explosions At Sakurajima (Japan), Matthew R. Vonlintig

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Volcanic eruptions are powerful natural phenomena that often occur unpredictably in time and magnitude. Nearby communities are put at risk during volcanic unrest; however, when hazards are well understood and clearly defined risk can be mitigated. This thesis addresses the problem of forecasting the likelihood of future explosive volcanic behavior by monitoring ongoing eruptive history with infrasound. I parameterize inter-event temporal behavior to determine the eruption controlling processes is material failure opposed to changes in magma and volatile supply.

I analyze data from Sakurajima, a type-example open volcano, using two local (4 km from the vent) microphone arrays, which recorded …

Evaluating Stable Isotope And Geochronologic Techniques For Paleoclimate Reconstruction: Case Study Of The Santa Cruz Formation, Argentina, Robin B. Trayler

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Stable isotope analysis has become the method of choice for many studies investigating the paleoecology and paleoclimate of fossil mammal faunas. While organic tissues (collagen, keratins, proteins) persist for < 10⁵ years highly mineralized tooth enamel is resistant to alteration and degradation and faithfully preserves its isotopic composition for millions (> 10⁶) years. Reconstructing past climates from these records relies on both understanding both micro-scale mechanisms of isotope incorporation into individual teeth, and macro-scale changes in isotope compositions over hundreds of thousands or millions of years. In this dissertation I address three questions.

First, how does the geometry and …

Post-Fire Variation In Aeolian Deposition In The Northern Great Basin, Clayton Roehner

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Aeolian processes play a significant role in the redistribution of sediment and nutrients in sparsely vegetated sagebrush-steppe ecosystems. When fire is introduced to the landscape, decreased surface roughness and associated threshold friction velocities allow for the increased mobility of surface sediments and burnt organic material, mobilizing previously stable material. Once material is entrained, interactions between a dynamic atmosphere and complex topography control the spatial distribution of aeolian deposition over a landscape. Given the significant impact of fire on aeolian processes in semi-arid deserts, we posit that postfire aeolian redistribution of material is an important control on the spatial variability of …

Strong Mutation-Based Test Generation Of Xacml Policies, Roshan Shrestha

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

There exist various testing methods for XACML policies which vary in their overall fault detection ability and none of them can detect all the (killable) injected faults except for the simple policies. Further, it is unclear that what is essential for the fault detection of XACML policies. To address these issues, we formalized the fault detection conditions in the well-studied fault model of XACML policies so that it becomes clear what is essential for the fault detection. We formalized fault detection conditions in the form of reachability, necessity and propagation constraint. We, then, exploit these constraints to generate a mutation-based …

Using Dna For Data Storage: Encoding And Decoding Algorithm Development, Kelsey Suyehira

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

The recent explosion of digital data has created an increasing need for improved data storage architectures with the ability to store large amounts of data over extensive periods of time. DNA as a data storage solution shows promise with a thousand times greater increase in information density and information retention times ranging from hundreds to thousands of years. This thesis explores the challenges and potential approaches in developing an encoding and decoding algorithm for use in a DNA data storage architecture. When encoding binary data into sequences representing DNA strands, the algorithms should account for biological constraints representing the idiosyncrasies …

Privacy-Preserving Genomic Data Publishing Via Differential Privacy, Tanya Khatri

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Privacy-preserving data publishing is a mechanism for sharing data while ensuring the privacy of individuals is preserved in the published data and utility is maintained for data mining and analysis. There is a huge need for sharing genomic data to advance medical and health research. However, since genomic data is highly sensitive and the ultimate identifier, it is a big challenge to publish genomic data while protecting the privacy of individuals in the data.

In this thesis, we address the aforementioned challenge by presenting an approach for privacy-preserving genomic data publishing via differentially-private suffix tree. The proposed algorithm uses a …

Selective Strong Screenability, Isaac Joseph Coombs

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Screenability and strong screenability were both introduced some sixty years ago by R.H. Bing in his paper Metrization of Topological Spaces. Since then, much work has been done in exploring selective screenability (the selective version of screenability). However, the corresponding selective version of strong screenability has been virtually ignored. In this paper we seek to remedy this oversight. It is found that a great deal of the proofs about selective screenability readily carry over to proofs for the analogous version for selective strong screenability. We give some examples of selective strongly screenable spaces with the primary example being Pol's …

Utilizing Satellite Fusion Methods To Assess Vegetation Phenology In A Semi-Arid Ecosystem, Megan Gallagher

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Dryland ecosystems cover over 40% of the Earth’s surface, and are highly heterogeneous systems dependent upon rainfall and temperature. Climate change and anthropogenic activities have caused considerable shifts in vegetation and fire regimes, leading to desertification, habitat loss, and the spread of invasive species. Modern public satellite imagery is unable to detect fine temporal and spatial changes that occur in drylands. These ecosystems can have rapid phenological changes, and the heterogeneity of the ground cover is unable to be identified at course pixel sizes (e.g. 250 m). We develop a system that uses data from multiple satellites to model finer …

From Snow To Flow: Exploring Relationships Between Snotel Ablation Curves And Peak Streamflow Timing, Kara Jane Ferguson

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Predictions of peak streamflow timing in snow-dominated river systems are essential for proper water management and recreational availability. This study evaluates historic snow and streamflow data from 14 river basins throughout Idaho to investigate the relationship between snowmelt timing at SNOw TELemetry (SNOTEL) sites and peak streamflow within each basin. The goal is to provide a simple operational tool that estimates the probability of peak streamflow occurring within a certain number of days as ablation progresses from 0 to 100% melted. For individual basins we evaluate meltout levels in increments of 10% from each SNOTEL site and use a probabilistic …

Exploring The Role Of Deforestation On Regional Hydroclimate In Southeast Africa: An Approach Fusing Models And Data, Megan Maksimowicz

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Land cover acts as the gatekeeper to incoming and outgoing energy and water fluxes at the land surface, partitioning energy and water in accordance with the vegetation type and in response to atmospheric forcings. As Land Surface Models become more complex and more capable of simulating the coupled dynamics of the land-atmosphere system in greater spatial detail, the need for accurate representation of spatial distribution of vegetation types and their dynamics through time grows.

As humans modify land cover, there are complex dynamics at play between the vegetation, the surface energy balance and the cycling of water. The resultant hydroclimatic …

Modern Electronic Structure Theory: The Search For Chemical Accuracy, Jonathan Prince

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Electronic structure theory has progressed significantly within the last few decades, venturing far from the early days of the Hartree-Fock self-consistent field method. Modern electronic structure theory focuses on compound methods, which operate under the idea that we can take a lower level of theory computation (typically, a result from Hartree-Fock, Configuration Interaction, Coupled Cluster or Moller-Plesset perturbation theory) and add in higher level of the theory corrections such as extrapolations to the infinite basis set limit, as well as, relativistic effects.

Using the Gaussian-n, Complete Basis Set and Weizmann compound methods, we were able to provide theoretical evidence to …

Evaporation Depth Controls The Relationship Between Soil Water Mobility And Soil Water Isotopic Composition, John Byars Shuler

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Recent studies of plant water uptake assume that soil water isotopic composition can be used to infer soil water mobility. However, the strength of the relationship between mobility and isotopic composition remains poorly constrained. In addition, many ecohydrologic investigations are restricted by low sampling frequencies and insufficient soil moisture and matric potential data to support assumptions of soil water mobility. We sampled bulk soil water every 14 to 21 days in hillslope and riparian profiles during the 2016 and 2017 growing seasons in a semi-arid watershed outside Boise, ID. We collected twig samples of four tree and shrub species concurrently. …

Assessment Of Snow Atmosphere Forcing During Central Idaho Atmospheric Rivers, William Rudisill

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Atmospheric Rivers (AR) are globally occuring weather features and the primary mechanism through which water vapor moves from the tropics and subtropics towards the mid-latitudes, doing so at rates comparable to the world’s largest terrestrial rivers. AR that encounter mountains often cause extreme precipitation in the form of rain and snow, high winds, and flooding in many watersheds. They account for as much as 20-30% of cool season precipitation in the central Idaho Mountains. In the Northern Hemisphere, seasonal snow cover during Winter and Spring months is the most variable land surface component in space and time, and acts on …

Leveraging Tiled Display For Big Data Visualization Using D3.Js, Ujjwal Acharya

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Data visualization has proven effective at detecting patterns and drawing inferences from raw data by transforming it into visual representations. As data grows large, visualizing it faces two major challenges: 1) limited resolution i.e. a screen is limited to a few million pixels but the data can have a billion data points, and 2) computational load i.e. processing of this data becomes computationally challenging for a single node system. This work addresses both of these issues for efficient big data visualization. In the developed system, a High Pixel Density and Large Format display was used enabling the display of fine …

Fostering The Retrieval Of Suitable Web Resources In Response To Children's Educational Search Tasks, Oghenemaro Deborah Anuyah

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Children regularly turn to search engines (SEs) to locate school-related materials. Unfortunately, research has shown that when utilizing SEs, children do not always access resources that specifically target them. To support children, popular and child-oriented SEs make available a safe search filter, which is meant to eliminate inappropriate resources. Safe search is, however, not always the perfect deterrent as pornographic and hate-based resources may slip through the filter, while resources relevant to an educational search context may be misconstrued and filtered out. Moreover, filtering inappropriate resources in response to children searches is just one perspective to consider in offering them …

Detecting Saliency By Combining Speech And Object Detection In Indoor Environments, Kiran Thapa

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Describing scenes such as rooms, city streets, or routes, is a very common human task that requires the ability to identify and describe the scene sufficiently for a hearer to develop a mental model of the scene. When people talk about such scenes, they mention some objects of the scene at the exclusion of others. We call the mentioned objects salient objects as people consider them noticeable or important in comparison to other non-mentioned objects. In this thesis, we look at saliency of visual scenes and how visual saliency informs what can and should be said about a scene when …

Performance, Scalability, And Robustness In Distributed File Tree Copy, Christopher Robert Sutton

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

As storage needs continually increase, and network file systems become more common, the need arises for tools that efficiently copy to and from these types of file systems. Traditional copy tools like the Linux cp utility were originally created for traditional storage systems, where storage is managed by a single host machine. cp uses a single-threaded approach to copying files. Using a multi-threaded approach would likely not provide an advantage in this system since the disk accesses are the bottleneck for this type of operation. In a distributed file system the disk accesses are spread across multiple hosts, and many …

Using Landlab, A Fine Scale Biogeography Model, To Measure The Sustainability Of Semi-Arid Vegetation In A Changing Climate, Lucy Gelb

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

The distribution of vegetation in water-limited ecosystems is a product of complex and nonlinear interactions between climatic forcings (e.g., precipitation, temperature, solar radiation) and the underlying geomorphic template, which includes topography, geology, and soils. Changes in climate, particularly in precipitation and temperature, can dramatically alter the organization of vegetation. This is especially true in ecotones such as our area of study: the semi-arid transition between Great Basin shrub-steppe ecosystems and the coniferous forests of the Northern Rockies. Understanding and predicting how the spatial composition of terrestrial vegetation communities will change in these ecosystems is critical to predicting important future landscape …

Geochemical Dynamics And Nitrous Oxide Release From The Hyporheic Zone Of Streams, Annika Marie Quick

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

The hyporheic zones of streams and rivers, consisting of the sediments beneath and immediately adjacent to the stream channel, are an important site of geochemical processing. Due to the difficulty of measuring these geochemical processes in the hyporheic zone in situ with meaningful spatial and temporal resolution, we conducted multiple column and large-scale flume experiments to model 1D and 2D hyporheic flow paths and observed important geochemical reactions, including the production and consumption of nitrous oxide (N₂O). N₂O is a significant greenhouse gas, but the controls on its emissions from streams are poorly constrained. We describe …

Identifying Evidence For Explosive Volcanism On Mars Through Geomorphologic And Thermophysical Observations, Gabriel Cecilio Garcia

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Accurately identifying the products of explosive volcanism on Mars is critical for unraveling the evolution of the martian crust and interior. Recent work using high-resolution datasets suggest explosive volcanic processes may have dominated over effusive activity in early martian history. However, distinguishing the products of explosive volcanism from non-volcanic sediments remains challenging since both are similar in thermophysical and geomorphologic datasets.

The objective of this study is to identify geomorphologic and thermophysical characteristics of possible explosive volcanic deposits on Apollinaris Mons, one of the best-known candidates for explosive volcanism on Mars, using visible and thermal infrared imaging datasets. These geomorphic …

Multi-Channel Ground-Penetrating Radar For The Continuous Quantification Of Snow And Firn Density, Depth, And Accumulation, Tate Meehan

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

A priority of ice sheet surface mass balance (SMB) prediction is ascertaining the surface density and annual snow accumulation. These forcing data are inputs for firn density models and can be used to inform remotely sensed ice sheet surface processes and to assess Regional Climate Model (RCM) skill. The Greenland Traverse for Accumulation and Climate Studies (GreenTrACS) retrieved 16 shallow firn cores and dug 42 snow pits along the Western percolation zone of the Greenland Ice Sheet (GrIS) during May and June of 2016 and 2017. I deployed and maintained a multi-channel 500 MHz ground-penetrating radar in a multi-offset configuration …

Secure Multiparty Protocol For Differentially-Private Data Release, Anthony Harris

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

In the era where big data is the new norm, a higher emphasis has been placed on models which guarantees the release and exchange of data. The need for privacy-preserving data arose as more sophisticated data-mining techniques led to breaches of sensitive information. In this thesis, we present a secure multiparty protocol for the purpose of integrating multiple datasets simultaneously such that the contents of each dataset is not revealed to any of the data owners, and the contents of the integrated data do not compromise individual’s privacy. We utilize privacy by simulation to prove that the protocol is privacy-preserving, …