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Articles 1 - 13 of 13

Full-Text Articles in Physical Sciences and Mathematics

A Stochastic Sediment Delivery Model For A Steep Mediterranean Landscape, Emmanuel Gabet, Thomas Dunne Sep 2003

A Stochastic Sediment Delivery Model For A Steep Mediterranean Landscape, Emmanuel Gabet, Thomas Dunne

Faculty Publications

It is a truism in geomorphology that climatic events operate on a landscape to drive sediment transport processes, yet few investigations have formally linked climate and terrain characteristics with geomorphological processes. In this study, we incorporate sediment transport equations derived from fieldwork into a computer model that predicts the delivery of sediment from hillslopes in a steep Mediterranean landscape near Santa Barbara, California. The sediment transport equations are driven by rainstorms and fires that are stochastically generated from probability distributions. The model is used to compare the rates and processes of sediment delivery under two vegetation types: coastal sage scrub …


Planning Your Way To A More Usable Web Site, Pamela Gore, Sandra Hirsh May 2003

Planning Your Way To A More Usable Web Site, Pamela Gore, Sandra Hirsh

Faculty Publications

Planning for long-term periodic usability assessment is therefore as important as adding regularly fresh content and tracking usage. Fortunately, usability assessments need not be time consuming or expensive, unless your site is large and complex and you want to test it thoroughly each time. In a practical sense, usability assessment can reveal problems in the design, navigation, layout, or labeling that prevent users from finding what they need quickly. After analyzing your environment and setting the stage for ongoing usability assessment, it is time to develop the usability assessment plan, which will serve as the blueprint for usability assessment activities …


Web Mining For Web Personalization, Magdalini Eirinaki, Michalis Vazirgiannis Feb 2003

Web Mining For Web Personalization, Magdalini Eirinaki, Michalis Vazirgiannis

Magdalini Eirinaki

Web personalization is the process of customizing a Web site to the needs of specific users, taking advantage of the knowledge acquired from the analysis of the user's navigational behavior (usage data) in correlation with other information collected in the Web context, namely, structure, content, and user profile data. Due to the explosive growth of the Web, the domain of Web personalization has gained great momentum both in the research and commercial areas. In this article we present a survey of the use of Web mining for Web personalization. More specifically, we introduce the modules that comprise a Web personalization …


Sediment Transport By Dry Ravel, Emmanuel Gabet Jan 2003

Sediment Transport By Dry Ravel, Emmanuel Gabet

Faculty Publications

Dry ravel is a general term that describes the rolling, bouncing, and sliding of individual particles down a slope and is a dominant hillslope sediment transport process in steep arid and semiarid landscapes. During fires, particles can be mobilized by the collapse of sediment wedges that have accumulated behind vegetation. On a daily basis, particles may be mobilized by bioturbation and by small landslides. Experiments on a dry ravel flume indicate that a basic expression of the momentum equation predicts the distance traveled by particles propelled down a rough surface. This equation is further elaborated to produce a nonlinear slope-dependent …


Sediment Detachment By Rain Power, Emmanuel Gabet, Thomas Dunne Jan 2003

Sediment Detachment By Rain Power, Emmanuel Gabet, Thomas Dunne

Faculty Publications

In interrill areas, overland flow is often incapable of detaching soil particles so detachment is primarily by raindrop impact. We derive a mathematical expression, rain power (R, W m−2), relating the energy expenditure of raindrops impacting a soil surface to the rate of detachment of soil particles. Rain power incorporates rainfall, hillslope, and vegetation characteristics and is modulated by flow depths. Rainfall simulation experiments on natural hillslopes were performed to measure detachment rates and across-slope flow depth distributions in surface runoff. Our results indicate that flow depths follow a Poisson distribution, and this observation is used to develop a dimensionless …


Inverted Velocity Profile In The Cylindrical Couette Flow Of A Rarefied Gas, Alejandro Garcia, K. Aoki, H. Yoshida, T. Nakanishi Jan 2003

Inverted Velocity Profile In The Cylindrical Couette Flow Of A Rarefied Gas, Alejandro Garcia, K. Aoki, H. Yoshida, T. Nakanishi

Faculty Publications

The cylindrical Couette flow of a rarefied gas is investigated, under the diffuse-specular reflection condition of Maxwell’s type on the cylinders, in the case where the inner cylinder is rotating whereas the outer cylinder is at rest. The inverted velocity profile for small accommodation coefficients, pointed out by Tibbs, Baras, and Garcia [Phys. Rev. E 56, 2282 (1997)] on the basis of a Monte Carlo simulation, is investigated extensively by means of a systematic asymptotic analysis for small Knudsen numbers as well as the direct numerical analysis of the Boltzmann equation, and the parameter range in which the phenomenon appears …


A Direct Simulation Monte Carlo Method For The Uehling-Uhlenbeck-Boltzmann Equation, Alejandro Garcia, W. Wagner Jan 2003

A Direct Simulation Monte Carlo Method For The Uehling-Uhlenbeck-Boltzmann Equation, Alejandro Garcia, W. Wagner

Faculty Publications

In this paper we describe a direct simulation Monte Carlo algorithm for the Uehling-Uhlenbeck-Boltzmann equation in terms of Markov processes. This provides a unifying framework for both the classical Boltzmann case as well as the Fermi-Dirac and Bose-Einstein cases. We establish the foundation of the algorithm by demonstrating its link to the kinetic equation. By numerical experiments we study its sensitivity to the number of simulation particles and to the discretization of the velocity space, when approximating the steady-state distribution.


Tracing The Star Stream Through M31 Using Planetary Nebula Kinematics, H. R. Merrett, K. Kuijken, M. R. Merrifield, Aaron J. Romanowsky, N. G. Douglas, N. R. Napolitano, M. Arnaboldi, M. Capaccioli, K. C. Freeman, O. Gerhard, N. W. Evans, M. I. Wilkinson, C. Halliday, T. J. Bridges, D. Carter Jan 2003

Tracing The Star Stream Through M31 Using Planetary Nebula Kinematics, H. R. Merrett, K. Kuijken, M. R. Merrifield, Aaron J. Romanowsky, N. G. Douglas, N. R. Napolitano, M. Arnaboldi, M. Capaccioli, K. C. Freeman, O. Gerhard, N. W. Evans, M. I. Wilkinson, C. Halliday, T. J. Bridges, D. Carter

Faculty Publications

We present a possible orbit for the Southern Stream of stars in M31, which connects it to the Northern Spur. Support for this model comes from the dynamics of planetary nebulae (PNe) in the disc of M31: analysis of a new sample of 2611 PNe obtained using the Planetary Nebula Spectrograph reveals ∼20 objects with kinematics inconsistent with the normal components of the galaxy, but which lie at the right positions and velocities to connect the two photometric features via this orbit. The satellite galaxy M32 is coincident with the stream both in position and velocity, adding weight to the …


A Dearth Of Dark Matter In Ordinary Elliptical Galaxies, Aaron J. Romanowsky, N. G. Douglas, M. Arnaboldi, K. Kuijken, M. R. Merrifield, N. R. Napolitano, M. Capaccioli Jan 2003

A Dearth Of Dark Matter In Ordinary Elliptical Galaxies, Aaron J. Romanowsky, N. G. Douglas, M. Arnaboldi, K. Kuijken, M. R. Merrifield, N. R. Napolitano, M. Capaccioli

Faculty Publications

The kinematics of the outer parts of three intermediate-luminosity elliptical galaxies were studied with the Planetary Nebula Spectrograph. The galaxies' velocity-dispersion profiles were found to decline with the radius, and dynamical modeling of the data indicates the presence of little if any dark matter in these galaxies' halos. This unexpected result conflicts with findings in other galaxy types and poses a challenge to current galaxy formation theories.


A Direct Simulation Monte Carlo Method For The Uehling-Uhlenbeck-Boltzmann Equation, Alejandro Garcia, Wolfgang Wagner Jan 2003

A Direct Simulation Monte Carlo Method For The Uehling-Uhlenbeck-Boltzmann Equation, Alejandro Garcia, Wolfgang Wagner

Alejandro Garcia

In this paper we describe a direct simulation Monte Carlo algorithm for the Uehling-Uhlenbeck-Boltzmann equation in terms of Markov processes. This provides a unifying framework for both the classical Boltzmann case as well as the Fermi-Dirac and Bose-Einstein cases. We establish the foundation of the algorithm by demonstrating its link to the kinetic equation. By numerical experiments we study its sensitivity to the number of simulation particles and to the discretization of the velocity space, when approximating the steady-state distribution.


Inverted Velocity Profile In The Cylindrical Couette Flow Of A Rarefied Gas, Alejandro Garcia, K. Aoki, H. Yoshida, T. Nakanishi Jan 2003

Inverted Velocity Profile In The Cylindrical Couette Flow Of A Rarefied Gas, Alejandro Garcia, K. Aoki, H. Yoshida, T. Nakanishi

Alejandro Garcia

The cylindrical Couette flow of a rarefied gas is investigated, under the diffuse-specular reflection condition of Maxwell’s type on the cylinders, in the case where the inner cylinder is rotating whereas the outer cylinder is at rest. The inverted velocity profile for small accommodation coefficients, pointed out by Tibbs, Baras, and Garcia [Phys. Rev. E 56, 2282 (1997)] on the basis of a Monte Carlo simulation, is investigated extensively by means of a systematic asymptotic analysis for small Knudsen numbers as well as the direct numerical analysis of the Boltzmann equation, and the parameter range in which the phenomenon appears …


A Dearth Of Dark Matter In Ordinary Elliptical Galaxies, Aaron J. Romanowsky, N. G. Douglas, M. Arnaboldi, K. Kuijken, M. R. Merrifield, N. R. Napolitano, M. Capaccioli Jan 2003

A Dearth Of Dark Matter In Ordinary Elliptical Galaxies, Aaron J. Romanowsky, N. G. Douglas, M. Arnaboldi, K. Kuijken, M. R. Merrifield, N. R. Napolitano, M. Capaccioli

Aaron J. Romanowsky

The kinematics of the outer parts of three intermediate-luminosity elliptical galaxies were studied with the Planetary Nebula Spectrograph. The galaxies' velocity-dispersion profiles were found to decline with the radius, and dynamical modeling of the data indicates the presence of little if any dark matter in these galaxies' halos. This unexpected result conflicts with findings in other galaxy types and poses a challenge to current galaxy formation theories.


Tracing The Star Stream Through M31 Using Planetary Nebula Kinematics, H. R. Merrett, K. Kuijken, M. R. Merrifield, Aaron J. Romanowsky, N. G. Douglas, N. R. Napolitano, M. Arnaboldi, M. Capaccioli, K. C. Freeman, O. Gerhard, N. W. Evans, M. I. Wilkinson, C. Halliday, T. J. Bridges, D. Carter Jan 2003

Tracing The Star Stream Through M31 Using Planetary Nebula Kinematics, H. R. Merrett, K. Kuijken, M. R. Merrifield, Aaron J. Romanowsky, N. G. Douglas, N. R. Napolitano, M. Arnaboldi, M. Capaccioli, K. C. Freeman, O. Gerhard, N. W. Evans, M. I. Wilkinson, C. Halliday, T. J. Bridges, D. Carter

Aaron J. Romanowsky

We present a possible orbit for the Southern Stream of stars in M31, which connects it to the Northern Spur. Support for this model comes from the dynamics of planetary nebulae (PNe) in the disc of M31: analysis of a new sample of 2611 PNe obtained using the Planetary Nebula Spectrograph reveals ∼20 objects with kinematics inconsistent with the normal components of the galaxy, but which lie at the right positions and velocities to connect the two photometric features via this orbit. The satellite galaxy M32 is coincident with the stream both in position and velocity, adding weight to the …