Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Architecture, Modeling, And Analysis Of A Plasma Impedance Probe, Magathi Jayaram

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Variations in ionospheric plasma density can cause large amplitude and phase changes in the radio waves passing through this region. Ionospheric weather can have detrimental effects on several communication systems, including radars, navigation systems such as the Global Positioning Sytem (GPS), and high-frequency communications. As a result, creating models of the ionospheric density is of paramount interest to scientists working in the field of satellite communication.

Numerous empirical and theoretical models have been developed to study the upper atmosphere climatology and weather. Multiple measurements of plasma density over a region are of marked importance while creating these models. The lack …

Who Wins And Who Loses? A Community Approach To Understanding The Well-Being Of Boomtown Residents, Douglas Alan Malloy

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

The purpose of this thesis is to accurately identify residents of a boomtown who are either experiencing a higher level of well-being, or lower level of well-being. By definition, we consider the former to be winning, and the latter to be losing. Multivariate ordinary least squares regression analyses help to distinguish between winners and losers by generating statistical coefficients which will show both strength and direction of the relationship between individuals and various indicators of social well-being.

The data used in this thesis are from a community impact study issued in the spring of 2009, to residents of …

Learning-Based Fusion For Data Deduplication: A Robust And Automated Solution, Jared Dinerstein

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This thesis presents two deduplication techniques that overcome the following critical and long-standing weaknesses of rule-based deduplication: (1) traditional rule-based deduplication requires significant manual tuning of the individual rules, including the selection of appropriate thresholds; (2) the accuracy of rule-based deduplication degrades when there are missing data values, significantly reducing the efficacy of the expert-defined deduplication rules.

The first technique is a novel rule-level match-score fusion algorithm that employs kernel-machine-based learning to discover the decision threshold for the overall system automatically. The second is a novel clue-level match-score fusion algorithm that addresses both Problem 1 and 2. This unique solution …

Assessing Linkages Among Landscape Characteristics, Stream Habitat, And Macroinvertebrate Communities In The Idaho Batholith Ecoregion, Andrew C. Hill

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Understanding the composition of lotic communities and the landscape processes and habitat characteristics that shape them is one of the main challenges confronting stream ecologists. In order to better understand the linkages among landscape processes, stream habitat, and biological communities and to understand how accurately our measurements represent important factors influencing biological communities, it is important to test explicit hypotheses regarding these linkages. Increasing our understanding of aquatic communities in a hierarchical context and recognizing how well our measurements represent factors structuring aquatic communities will help managers better evaluate the influence of land management practices on aquatic ecosystems, direct conservation …

Interclonal Variation Of Primary And Secondary Chemistry In Western Quaking Aspen And Its Influence On Ungulate Selection, Damon A. Winter

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Quaking aspen (Populus tremuloides) clones within close proximity to one another can exhibit drastically different levels of browsing by ungulates. The objectives of this study were to (1) determine interclonal differences in plant chemistry between adjacent clones exhibiting different degrees of herbivory which may influence the browsing behavior and patterns of ungulates, and (2) determine if correlation exists in the levels of salicortin and tremulacin between current year's suckers and current year's growth on older trees. This second objective was meant to indicate a protocol for land managers for identifying clones meriting increased protection from herbivory after treatment …

Generalized Twisted Quantum Doubles And The Mckay Correspondence, Christopher D. Goff, Geoffrey Mason

College of the Pacific Faculty Articles

We consider a class of quasiHopf algebras which we call generalized twisted quantum doubles. They are abelian extensions H=C[G¯]∗⋈C[G] (G is a finite group, G¯ a homomorphic image, and * denotes the dual algebra), possibly twisted by a 3-cocycle, and are a natural generalization of the twisted quantum double construction of Dijkgraaf, Pasquier and Roche. We show that if G is a subgroup of SU₂(C) then H exhibits an orbifold McKay Correspondence: certain fusion rules of H define a graph with connected components indexed by conjugacy classes of G¯, each connected component being an extended affine Diagram of …

On The Cover

Sci-Tech News

No abstract provided.

Conference Report From Bonnie Hilditch International Librarian Award Winner, Shantanu Ganguly Ph.D.

Sci-Tech News

No abstract provided.

Science Today In Verse, Hope Leman

Sci-Tech News

No abstract provided.

Chemistry Division, Teri Vogel

Sci-Tech News

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Materials Research & Manufacturing Section, Bette Finn

Sci-Tech News

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Considerations On Unsupervised Spectral Data Unmixing And Complexity Pursuit, Stefan Robila

Department of Computer Science Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Hyperspectral sensors carry the distinctive advantage of recording hundreds of contiguous spectral images for the same scene providing an extraordinary amount of information that leads to precise differentiation of materials present in the scene even when such materials contribute only to few pixels [1]. With the advent of more and more powerful sensing platforms, coupled with reduction in manufacturing costs and diversification of technologies, hyperspectral imaging has become a powerful approach in remote sensing with applications spanning all traditional fields (such as agriculture, mining, military, resource management, etc.) as well as new ones (manufacturing quality control, pollution detection, health and …

Parallel Unmixing Of Hyperspectral Data Using Complexity Pursuit, Stefan Robila, Martin Butler

Department of Computer Science Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Accurate and fast data unmixing is key to most applications employing hyperspectral data. Among the large number unmixing approaches, Blind Source Separation (BSS) has been employed successfully through a variety of techniques, yet most of these approaches continue to be computationally expensive due to their iterative nature. In this context, it is imperative to seek efficient approaches that leverage the accuracy of the algorithms and the availability of off-the-shelf computationally performant systems such as multi-cpu and multi core. In this paper we tackle the spatial complexity based unmixing, a new technique shown to outperform many BSS solutions. We develop a …

Best-First Heuristic Search For Multicore Machines, Ethan Burns, Sofia N. Lemons, Wheeler Ruml, Rong Zhou

Computer Science

To harness modern multicore processors, it is imperative to develop parallel versions of fundamental algorithms. In this paper, we compare different approaches to parallel best-first search in a shared-memory setting. We present a new method, PBNF, that uses abstraction to partition the state space and to detect duplicate states without requiring frequent locking. PBNF allows speculative expansions when necessary to keep threads busy. We identify and fix potential livelock conditions in our approach, proving its correctness using temporal logic. Our approach is general, allowing it to extend easily to suboptimal and anytime heuristic search. In an empirical comparison on STRIPS …

Message From The Senior Vice Provost And Dean Of Undergraduate Studies, The Mcnair Team

McNair Scholars Research Journal

No abstract provided.

Graduate Scholar Profile, The Mcnair Team

McNair Scholars Research Journal

No abstract provided.

Full Issue, The Mcnair Team

McNair Scholars Research Journal

No abstract provided.

Batch Testing, Adaptive Algorithms, And Heuristic Applications For Stable Marriage Problems, John Dabney

All Dissertations

In this dissertation we focus on different variations of the stable matching (marriage) problem, initially posed by Gale and Shapley in 1962. In this problem, preference lists are used to match n men with n women in such a way that no (man, woman) pair exists that would both prefer each other over their current partners. These two would be considered a blocking pair, preventing a matching from being considered stable. In our research, we study three different versions of this problem.
First, we consider batch testing of stable marriage solutions. Gusfield and Irving presented an open problem in their …

Reporting Results Of Data Analysis, Preparing Scientific Manuscripts, And Website Development Efforts, Christopher N. Jacques

The Prairie Naturalist

Preparation of scientific manuscripts and use and presentation of statistics have been topics of several commentaries from previous journal Editors-in-Chief, and have been submitted as invited papers, so I would like to share my perspective as the current Editor-in-Chief (Editor) of The Prairie Naturalist (Journal). Because there is not complete consensus among the experts about when hypothesis testing versus information theoretic methods, or Bayesian versus frequentist methods are suitable, previous Editors have avoided presenting their perspectives (Thompson 2010). I also will avoid presenting my perspective as Editor. I will, however, present my perspective on several of these approaches and then …

Cropland Nesting By Long-Billed Curlews In Southern Alberta, James H. Devries, Steven O. Rimer, Elizabeth M. Walsh

The Prairie Naturalist

Long-billed curlews (Numenius americanus) are described primarily as a grassland nesting species. However, no studies to date have quantified nest habitat selection among available habitats. During a study of waterfowl nest habitat selection and success in landscapes ranging from cropland to grassland-dominated, we found 9 curlew nests of which 8 were located in active cropland within cropland-dominated landscapes. Cropland nests occurred in fall-seeded winter wheat and spring-seeded barley and nests were clumped in distribution. Four cropland nests and 1 nest in native grass pasture hatched young. Further research is needed to characterize nesting habitat selection and reproductive success …

Review Of Weeds Of The Midwestern United States & Central Canada, Edited By Charles T. Bryson And Michael S. Defelice, James Stubbendieck

The Prairie Naturalist

This volume is the culmination of work by more than 40 weed scientists and botanists. Its stated purpose is to help identifY the great diversity of weedy and invasive plants that interface with agriculture, industry, and natural ecosystems in central North America. The geographic range covered by this book extends from southeastern Saskatchewan to eastern Kansas, northern Kentucky, northwestern Pennsylvania, and southwestern Quebec. This is a welcome edition because a current book on unwanted plants has not been available for the eastern two-thirds of this region. The book is arranged taxonomically by family and alphabetically by species within each family. …

Summer Activity Pattern And Home Range Of Northern Pocket Gophers In An Alfalfa Field, Jon C. Pigage, Helen K. Pigage

The Prairie Naturalist

AIlocation of time for feeding, resting and reproduction in subterranean animals is difficult to determine. Although pocket gophers (Thomomys spp.) are among the most widely studied subterranean rodents, there are conflicting reports on activity measurement in these animals. Activity studies have included opening gopher burrows (Tryon 1947), laboratory studies of activity (Vaughan and Hansen 1961), telemetry studies (Anderson and McMahon 1981, Bandoli 1987, and Cameron et al. 1988), and subcutaneously implanted radioactive gold wires (Gettinger 1984). The diversity of techniques reflects the difficulty of generalizing results from different species of pocket gophers in natural and artificial environments. Patton and …

Bingroup: A Package For Group Testing, Christopher R. Bilder, Boan Zhang, Frank Schaarschmidt, Joshua M. Tebbs

The R Journal

When the prevalence of a disease or of some other binary characteristic is small, group testing (also known as pooled testing) is frequently used to estimate the prevalence and/or to identify individuals as positive or negative. We have developed the binGroup package as the first package designed to address the estimation problem in group testing. We present functions to estimate an overall prevalence for a homogeneous population. Also, for this set ting, we have functions to aid in the very important choice of the group size. When individuals come from a heterogeneous population, our group testing regression functions can be …

Source References, Duncan Murdoch

The R Journal

Since version 2.10.0, R includes expanded support for source references in R code and ‘.Rd’ files. This paper describes the origin and purposes of source references, and current and future support for them.

Dclone: Data Cloning In R, Péter Sólymos

The R Journal

The dclone R package contains low level functions for implementing maximum likelihood estimating procedures for complex models using data cloning and Bayesian Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods with support for JAGS, WinBUGS and OpenBUGS.

Spikeslab: Prediction And Variable Selection Using Spike And Slab Regression, Hemant Ishwaran, Udaya B. Kogalur, J. Sunil Rao

The R Journal

Weighted generalized ridge regression offers unique advantages in correlated high dimensional problems. Such estimators can be efficiently computed using Bayesian spike and slab models and are effective for prediction. For sparse variable selection, a generalization of the elastic net can be used in tandem with these Bayesian estimates. In this article, we de scribe the R-software package spikeslab for implementing this new spike and slab prediction and variable selection methodology.

Hglm: A Package For Fitting Hierarchical Generalized Linear Models, Lars Rönnegård, Xia Shen, Moudud Alam

The R Journal

We present the hglm package for fit ting hierarchical generalized linear models. It can be used for linear mixed models and generalized linear mixed models with random effects for a variety of links and a variety of distributions for both the outcomes and the random effects. Fixed effects can also be fitted in the dispersion part of the model.

Bayesian Estimation Of The Garch(1,1) Model With Student-T Innovations, David Ardia, Lennart F. Hoogerheide

The R Journal

This note presents the R package bayesGARCH which provides functions for the Bayesian estimation of the parsimonious and effective GARCH(1,1) model with Student-t innovations. The estimation procedure is fully automatic and thus avoids the tedious task of tuning an MCMC sampling algorithm. The usage of the package is shown in an empirical application to exchange rate log-returns

Cudabayesreg: Bayesian Computation In Cuda, Adelino Ferreira Da Silva

The R Journal

Graphical processing units are rapidly gaining maturity as powerful general parallel computing devices. The package cudaBayesreg uses GPU–oriented procedures to improve the performance of Bayesian computations. The paper motivates the need for devising high performance computing strategies in the con text of fMRI data analysis. Some features of the package for Bayesian analysis of brain fMRI data are illustrated. Comparative computing performance figures between sequential and parallel implementations are presented as well.

Review Of Grouse Of The Plains And Mountains - The South Dakota Story, By Lester D. Flake, John W. Connelly, Thomas R. Kirschenmann, And Andrew J. Lindbloom., Brent E. Jamison

The Prairie Naturalist

Grouse are a fascinating group of birds that offer elaborate breeding displays for birders in the spring, provide sporting opportunities for hunters in the fall, and serve as indicators of grassland health. Though the authors claim that the book targets those who enjoy the outdoors, bird watching, and upland game bird hunting, there is ample reason for ecologists, ornithologists, and grouse researchers to reference this book as well. The book contains general information of interest to a broad audience, but often moves beyond the introductory information to greater detail. Many details are supported by peer-reviewed literature. This book strikes a …