Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Ga-Facilitated Classifier Optimization With Varying Similarity Measures, Michael R. Peterson, Travis E. Doom, Michael L. Raymer

Kno.e.sis Publications

Genetic algorithms are powerful tools for k-nearest neighbors classification. Traditional knn classifiers employ Euclidian distance to assess neighbor similarity, though other measures may also be used. GAs can search for optimal linear weights of features to improve knn performance using both Euclidian distance and cosine similarity. GAs also optimize additive feature offsets in search of an optimal point of reference for assessing angular similarity using the cosine measure. This poster explores weight and offset optimization for knn with varying similarity measures, including Euclidian distance (weights only), cosine similarity, and Pearson correlation. The use of offset optimization …

Evaluation And Perceived Impacts Of The North-Central Region Sare Grants, 1988-2002, Shirley K. Trout, Charles A. Francis, John E. Barbuto Jr.

Department of Agricultural Leadership, Education, and Communication: Faculty Publications

Evaluation of government-funded programs is essential to identify ways in which initial funding makes an impact and programs can improve. The purpose of this study was to understand the value of the North Central Region's Sustainable Agricultural Research and Education (SARE) grants operated through the United States Department of Agriculture, from their inception through 2002. Using both quantitative and qualitative data, impacts were explored from the perspective of former grant recipients. Survey data were collected from 171 former SARE and 33 interviews conducted with grant recipients who represented three different grant "families"--researchers, producers and educators. Descriptive, comparative, and exploratory analyses …

Description Logic Programs: A Practical Choice For The Modelling Of Ontologies, Rudi Studer, York Sure, Pascal Hitzler

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

Knowledge representation using ontologies constitutes the heart of semantic technologies. Despite successful standardization efforts by the W3C, however, there are still numerous different ontology representation languages being used, and interoperability between them is in general not given. The problem is aggrevated by the fact that current standards lay foundations only and are well-known to be insufficient for the modelling of finer details. Thus, a plethora of extensions of the basic languages is being proposed, rendering the picture of ontology representation languages to be chaotic, to say the least. While semantic technologies start to become applicable and are being applied in …

Integrating Semantic Web Services For Mobile Access, Anupriya Ankolekar, Pascal Hitzler, Holger Lewen, Daniel Oberle, Rudi Studer

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

We present our work in integrating Semantic Web services for access via mobile devices. We have developed a system, the WebServiceAccessComponent, that transforms a user request for a service on a mobile device, to a Web service request and then selects a matching service from the existing Web services of the Deutsche Telekom, which provide navigational and weather information. In this poster, we present the requirements and design of the WebServiceAccessComponent.

Semantic Management Of Web Services Using The Core Ontology Of Services, Daniel Oberle, Steffen Lamparter, Andreas Eberhart, Stephan Grimm, Sudhir Agarwal, Rudi Studer, Pascal Hitzler

Kno.e.sis Publications

Different Web Service standards like WSDL, WS-Security, WS-Policy etc., henceforth referred to as WS*, factorize Web Service management tasks into different aspects, such as input/output, workflow, or security. The advantages of WS* are multiple and have already achieved industrial impact. WS* descriptions are exchangeable and developers may use different implementations for the same Web Service description. The disadvantages of WS*, however, are also apparent: even though the different standards are complementary, they must overlap and one may produce models composed of different WS* descriptions, which are inconsistent with each other, but the reasons for the inconsistencies are not easily determined. …

Analyzing The Effects Of Various Sign Types Used By The Bureau Of Land Management For Desert Cleanup And Restoration Projects, Christopher Linehan

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

What is the effectiveness of attempts to curb illegal dumping with prompts on signs posted in the area? Do positive friendly language prompts such as “Restoration in Progress Please Do Not Disturb” generate more positive attitudes and intentions towards illegal dumping problems, than less friendly prompts such as “No Dumping Allowed”?

Results, although inconclusive, did however show a slight trend towards the negative language signs.

Number Comprehension By A Grey Parrot (Psittacus Erithacus), Including A Zero-Like Concept, Irene M. Pepperberg, Jesse D. Gordon

Sentience Collection

A Grey parrot (Psittacus erithacus) that was able to quantify 6 item sets (including subsets of heterogeneous groups, e.g., blue blocks within groupings of blue and green blocks and balls) using English labels (I. M. Pepperberg, 1994a) was tested on comprehension of these labels, which is crucial for numerical competence (K. C. Fuson, 1988). He was, without training, asked “What color/object [number]?” for collections of various simultaneously presented quantities (e.g., subsets of 4, 5, and 6 blocks of 3 different colors; subsets of 2, 4, and 6 keys, corks, and sticks). Accuracy was greater than 80% and was unaffected by …

Range Expansion By Moose Into Coastal Temperate Rainforests Of British Columbia, Canada, C. T. Darimont, P. C. Paquet, T. E. Reimchen, V. Crichton

Biogeography and Ecological Opportunity Collection

Ranges of species are dynamic and respond to long-term climate change and contemporary effects such as habitat modification. We report here that moose (Alces alces) have recently colonized coastal temperate rainforests of British Columbia, Canada. Contrary to recent publications, field observations of moose and their sign, combined with their occurrence in wolf (Canis lupus) faeces, suggest that moose are now widespread on the coastal mainland and occur on least three islands. Traditional ecological knowledge (information accumulated by aboriginal peoples about their environment) suggests that colonization occurred during the mid 1900s, concomitant with logging of major watersheds that bisect the Coast …

An Ontological Approach To The Document Access Problem Of Insider Threat, Boanerges Aleman-Meza, Phillip Burns, Matthew Eavenson, Devanand Palanswami, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Verification of legitimate access of documents, which is one aspect of the umbrella of problems in the Insider Threat category, is a challenging problem. This paper describes the research and prototyping of a system that takes an ontological approach, and is primarily targeted for use by theintelligence community. Our approach utilizes the notion of semantic associations and their discovery among a collection of heterogeneous documents. We highlight our contributions in (graphically) capturing the scope of the investigation assignment of an intelligence analyst by referring to classes and relationships of an ontology; in computing a measure of the relevance …

The Effect Of Scaling-Up On Remotely Derived Leaf Area Index Estimators In The Brazilian Amazon, John I. Menzies

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This research compared a traditional statistical technique with artificial neural networks to determine their effectiveness for modeling LAI in the Santarem region of the Brazilian Amazon. In addition, different satellite sensors in the form of ETM+, ASTER, MO DIS, and IKONOS were used to assess if spatial and spectral resolutions play a role in the ability to estimate LAI. This study focused on the following: (1) Determining if neural networks perform more accurately than multiple regression for LAI modeling (2) the effectiveness of different resolution satellite data including ETM+, ASTER, MODIS, and IKONOS for LAI estimation; (3) determining if spatial …

Semantic Web Services For N-Glycosylation Process, Satya S. Sahoo, Amit P. Sheth, William S. York, John A. Miller

Kno.e.sis Publications

Glycomics is one of the many research efforts currently underway in the biosciences domain, which is characterized by high throughput data generated at multiple experimental stages. For example, analysis of N-glycosylation encompasses stages from cell-culture to peptide identification and quantification. Research groups across the world use diverse cell cultures, separation and spectroscopic techniques, and data identification, correlation and integration methodologies. Thus, data generated at different phases of the process by multiple groups are both structurally and functionally heterogeneous.

Macrofungi Of The Tennessee River Gorge, William D. Starrett

Honors Theses

Representative macro fungi of the Tennessee River Gorge were collected on the Tennessee River Gorge Trust (TRGT) property during 18 forays I conducted fom May to November 2004. This dramatically added to the baseline data on the macrofungi of the TRGT by adding 15 orders, 34 families, and 138 species to the existing list. These data were recorded in the herbarium of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga database. I converted the University's File Maker Pro fungi database into Microsoft Excel and Access, which allows it to be processed for introduction into the National Biological Information Infrastructure and onto the …

Developing A Valid Screening Tool For Assessing Nutritional Adequacy And Osteoporosis Risk Among Vegans In The United States, Patricia Adelle Dyett

Loma Linda University Electronic Theses, Dissertations & Projects

The vegetarian lifestyle in the United States has increased significantly over recent decades. With this growth trend, it has become necessary to assess the pros and cons of vegetarian diet patterns, particularly with respect to nutrition adequacy and chronic disease concerns.

The vegan diet engenders more concern than other common vegetarian lifestyles because it seeks to replace all nutrient-rich animal food products with only plant foods. Consequently, there are concerns of compromised protein, calcium. vitamin D, vitamin B₁₂, n-3 fatty acid, zinc, and iron status. Moreover, because of typical vegan diet phenomena such as low BMI, low protein …

K-Means Clustering With Multiresolution Peak Detection, Guanshan Yu, Leen-Kiat Soh, Alan B. Bond

Avian Cognition Papers

Clustering is a practical data mining approach of pattern detection. Because of the sensitivity of initial conditions, k-means clustering often suffers from low clustering performance. We present a procedure to refine initial conditions of k-means clustering by analyzing density distributions of a data set before estimating the number of clusters k necessary for the data set, as well as the positions of the initial centroids of the clusters. We demonstrate that this approach indeed improves the accuracy and performance of k-means clustering measured by average intra to interclustering error ratio. This method is applied to the virtual ecology project to …

Possible Effects Field Hockey Stick Weight May Have On Player Performance During A Penalty Stroke, Lee-Ann Sharp

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Context: Wooden sticks have been used in field hockey since the inception of the game. In recent years, there has been a growing trend among players to use modern composite sticks. However, there has been no research into the possible effects the weight of these composite sticks could have on player's performances. Objective: The purpose of this study was to examine the effect stick weight would have on player perfonnance, specifically ball velocity and player accuracy, during a series of penalty strokes. Design: All subjects were required to take twenty penalty strokes on goal with each of the two differently …

Web Services To Semantic Web Processes: Investigating Synergy Between Practice And Research, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

No abstract provided.

The Neural Substrates Of Infant Sleep In Rats, Karl Æ. Karlsson, Andrew J. Gall, Ethan J. Mohns, Adele M. H. Seelke, Mark S. Blumberg

Faculty Publications

Sleep is a poorly understood behavior that predominates during infancy but is studied almost exclusively in adults. One perceived impediment to investigations of sleep early in ontogeny is the absence of state-dependent neocortical activity. Nonetheless, in infant rats, sleep is reliably characterized by the presence of tonic (i.e., muscle atonia) and phasic (i.e., myoclonic twitching) components; the neural circuitry underlying these components, however, is unknown. Recently, we described a medullary inhibitory area (MIA) in week-old rats that is necessary but not sufficient for the normal expression of atonia. Here we report that the infant MIA receives projections from areas containing …

Adoption Of Riparian Forest Buffers On Private Lands In Nebraska, Usa, Peter Skelton, Scott J. Josiah, James W. King, James R. Brandle, Glenn A. Helmers, Charles A. Francis

Department of Agricultural Leadership, Education, and Communication: Faculty Publications

Pesticide and nutrient runoff from agricultural fields is a socio-environmental problem in the Midwestern United States. Riparian forest buffers (RFBs) are a proven conservation practice that effectively manage this problem, though adoption rates are low. A mail survey was conducted to determine differences between adopter and nonadopter characteristics and attitudes with regard to the use of RFBs. Data were collected from 48 RFB adopters and 261 RFB nonadopters in two Nebraska watersheds. Inferential and multivaririate statistics were used to identify differences between adapter status and producer status groups. About half (50.8%) the respondents were nonproducers. Nonproducers are agricultural landowners not …

Reconstructability Analysis And Log-Linear Modeling, Martin Zwick

Complex Systems Faculty Publications and Presentations

Reconstructability Analysis (RA) is a method developed within the systems community for analyzing nominal (or discretized) data. RA both overlaps and extends Log-Linear (LL) modeling, and the purpose of this talk is to introduce RA to researchers unfamiliar with it. Two aspects of RA will be focused on: (1) its use for exploratory, as opposed to confirmatory, modeling – searching for good models in a vast space of possible models, and (2) state-based RA – analyzing data not in terms of relations among variables but in terms of relations among specific states of variables. Examples of applications to social science …

Big Brains Do Matter In New Environments, Lori Marino

Evolutionary Biology Collection

No abstract provided.

2005 - The Tenth Annual Symposium Of Student Scholars

Symposium of Student Scholars Program Books

The full program book from the Tenth Annual Symposium of Student Scholars, held on April 8, 2005. Includes abstracts from the presentations and posters.

Facts From Faeces: Prey Remains In Wolf, Canis Lupus, Faeces Revise Occurrence Records For Mammals Of British Columbia’S Coastal Archipelago, Michael H. H. Price, Chris T. Darimont, Neville N. Winchester, Paul C. Paquet

Biogeography and Ecological Opportunity Collection

Archipelagos often harbour taxa that are endemic and vulnerable to disturbance. Conservation planning and research for these areas depend fundamentally on accurate and current taxonomic inventories. Although basic ecological information is in its infancy, the temperate rainforest islands of coastal British Columbia are undergoing rapid human-caused modification, particularly logging. We report herein new mammal records for these islands as determined by prey remains in the faeces of Wolves (Canis lupus), the area’s apex mammalian terrestrial predator. Of particular interest is our detection of Marten (Martes americana) on islands previously inventoried and island occupancy by Moose (Alces alces), which have apparently …

Santa Clara Magazine, Volume 46 Number 4, Spring 2005, Santa Clara University

Santa Clara Magazine

8 - 'AN EXTRAORDINARY EVENT' By Elizabeth Kelley Gillogly '93. SCU Music Professor Hans Boepple is a gifted pianist and dedicated teacher.

10 - EMBRACING DIFFERENCES By Adam Breen. Senior Aaron Uchikura spent a summer helping children in Moscow orphanages.

12 - THE KOKO CONNECTION By Victoria Hendel De La O. Senior Tierra Wilson's perseverance landed her a job as a gorilla research assistant and caregiver.

16 - A ROTATION IN ETHICS By Rita Beamish '74. Students learn about the ethics of health care by shadowing doctors and nurses at O'Connor Hospital in San Jose.

Iowa Academy Of Science: The New Bulletin, V01n1, Spring 2005, Iowa Academy Of Science

New Bulletin

Inside This Issue:

--Message from the Executive Director

--New Electronic Iowa Science Teacher Journal

--Bringing the Lost Landscape into Iowa Classrooms

--The Iowa Junior Academy of Science at the 2005 AAAS Annual Meeting

--Iowa Science Foundation Grants

--Iowa Academy of Science Election 2005

--New Web Site Software

--IAS at the State Capitol

Bridging The Paradigm Gap With Rules For Owl, Jurgen Angele, Boris Motik, Rudi Studer, Pascal Hitzler

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

Accelerated by the vision of the semantic web, semantic technologies have recently made significant advances. The underlying methods and paradigms are already being transferred to adjacent areas of research in artificial intelligence, knowledge management, and elsewhere. Textbooks explaining the foundations have appeared. Large national and international projects on the topic are under way.

Availability Of Suitable Habitat For Northern River Otters In South Dakota, Alyssa M. Kiesow, Charles D. Dieter

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

Currently, the northern river otter (Lontra canadensis) is listed as a threatened species in South Dakota. We determined whether adequate habitat was available for reintroducing river otters in South Dakota. The 17 rivers/creeks included in the analysis were selected according to stream size, water gradient, and water permanence. A vegetation transect was conducted and a water sample was collected at each study site, ranging from one to four per river. Rivers/creeks were rated (1 = least suitable to 5 = most suitable) according to habitat requirements of river otters in the following categories: stream characteristics, watershed features, water …

Web Service Semantics - Wsdl-S, Rama Akkiraju, Joel Farrell, John A. Miller, Meenakshi Nagarajan, Amit P. Sheth, Kunal Verma

Kno.e.sis Publications

The current WSDL standard operates at the syntactic level and lacks the semantic expressivity needed to represent the requirements and capabilities of Web Services. Semantics can improve software reuse and discovery, significantly facilitate composition of Web services and enable integrating legacy applications as part of business process integration. The Web Service Semantic s technical note defines a mechanism to associate semantic annotations with Web services that are described using Web Service Description Language (WSDL). It is conceptually based on, but a significant refinement in details of, the original WSDL-S proposal [WSDL-S] from the LSDIS laboratory at the University of Georgia. …

Daily Rhythm Of Cerebral Blood Flow Velocity, Deirdre A. Conroy, Arthur J. Spielman, Rebecca Q. Scott

Publications and Research

Background: CBFV (cerebral blood flow velocity) is lower in the morning than in the afternoon and evening. Two hypotheses have been proposed to explain the time of day changes in CBFV: 1) CBFV changes are due to sleep-associated processes or 2) time of day changes in CBFV are due to an endogenous circadian rhythm independent of sleep. The aim of this study was to examine CBFV over 30 hours of sustained wakefulness to determine whether CBFV exhibits fluctuations associated with time of day.

Methods: Eleven subjects underwent a modified constant routine protocol. CBFV from the middle cerebral artery was monitored …

Effects Of Predation Pressure On The Cognitive Ability Of The Poeciliid Brachyraphis Episcopi, Culum Brown, Victoria A. Braithwaite

Sentience Collection

Variable levels of predation pressure are known to have significant impacts on the evolutionary ecology of different populations and can affect life-history traits, behavior, and morphology. To date, no studies have directly investigated the impact of predation pressure on cognitive ability. Here we use a system of replicate rivers, each with sites of high- and low-predation pressure, to investigate how this ecological variable affects learning ability in a tropical poeciliid, Brachyraphis episcopi. We used a spatial task to assess the cognitive ability of eight populations from four independent streams (four high- and four low- predation populations). The fish were required …

Why Is Maize A Sacred Plant? Social History And Agrarian Change On Sumba, Cynthia Twyford Fowler

Faculty Scholarship

Why has maize, a plant with origins in the New World, become ritually important in an indigenous Southeast Asian religion? While environmental conditions and agricultural economics are key determinants of everyday resource management practices in insular Southeast Asia, it is necessary to consider ethnic identity, political economy, and social structure in order to understand the religious significance of natural resources in contemporary society. Linguistic, cosmological, and horticultural data are combined with an analysis of local perceptions of culture and environment. This information is used to explain the transformation of an introduced plant into an indigenous sacrament. Ethnographic data, including a …