Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Cooperative Conservation: Increasing Capacity Through Community Partnerships -- Interagency Volunteer Program & Cooperative Conservation Program: Quarterly Progress Report, Period Ending December 31, 2005, Margaret N. Rees

Get Outdoors Nevada

• Database now contains 1,807 records, a 15% increase over the last quarter.
• Website activity increased, recording an average of 38,399 hits per month, with an average of 3,537 pages viewed per month.
• Inaugural interagency volunteer recognition event held October 28, 2005.
• Interagency training program (phase 1) scheduled for February 2006 (four sessions).
• Alternative Workforce Survey completed and delivered to National Park Service.

Take Pride In America In Southern Nevada: Quarterly Progress Report, Period Ending December 31, 2005, Margaret N. Rees

Anti-littering Programs

• Messaging campaign proposal approved by the federal Land Managers.
• Invitations sent to potential Community Steering Committee members.
• Project Manager Doug Joslin appointed to new county-wide Southern Nevada Recycling Advisory Committee.
• Four public service announcements produced by UNLV students.
• Contract with the Nevada Division of Forestry (NDF) in progress for prison crew site clean-ups.
• Plan for agency requests for additional dumpsters and/or roll-offs approved by team.

Measurements Of Trace Gas Emissions From Australian Forest Fires And Correlations With Coincident Measurements Of Aerosol Optical Depth, Clare Paton-Walsh, N. B. Jones, Stephen R. Wilson, V Haverd, A. Meier, D. W. Griffith

Faculty of Science - Papers (Archive)

We present vertically integrated measurements of C2H2, C2H4, C2H6, HCOOH, CO, H2CO, HCN and NH3 through smoke plumes from Australian forest fires measured by ground-based solar absorption spectroscopy. The column amounts of these gases are highly correlated with simultaneous, co-located measurements of aerosol optical depth, providing a potential method of mapping biomass-burning emissions using satellite measurements of aerosol optical depth. We have calculated emission ratios relative to CO for the trace gases using aerosol optical depth as a proxy for CO and converted to emission factors by using an average emission factor for CO from literature measurements of extra-tropical forest …

Foreign Migration To The Cleveland-Akron-Lorain Metropolitan Area From 1995 To 2000, Mark Salling, Ellen Cyran

All Maxine Goodman Levin School of Urban Affairs Publications

This report is one of a series on migration to and from the region using the five percent Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS) of the 2000 Census of Population and Housing and provides a description of foreign migrants moving to the Cleveland-Akron-Lorain (CAL) Consolidated Metropolitan Area (CMSA) from 1995 to 2000.* The report identifies the countries of origin of migrants and compares the demographic, socioeconomic, and housing characteristics of the foreign migrants to the CAL with other groups, including foreign migrants to Ohio and the nation, and, at times, to domestic migrants to and from the CAL.

College Of Engineering Senior Design Competition Fall 2005, University Of Nevada, Las Vegas

Fred and Harriet Cox Senior Design Competition Projects

Part of every UNLV engineering student’s academic experience, the senior design project stimulates engineering innovation and entrepreneurship. Each student in their senior year chooses, plans, designs and prototypes a product in this required element of the curriculum. A capstone to the student’s educational career, the senior design project encourages the student to use everything learned in the engineering program to create a practical, real world solution to an engineering challenge.

The senior design competition helps to focus the senior students in increasing the quality and potential for commercial application for their design projects. Judges from local industry evaluate the projects …

Living With Trees – Perspectives From The Suburbs, Lesley M. Head, Pat Muir

Faculty of Science - Papers (Archive)

A study of suburban backyards and backyarders in Sydney and Wollongong revealed evidence of attitudes and behaviours in relation to trees. Attitudes are characterised under themes that indicate conditions of tolerance and belonging. They include attachment/risk, order/freedom and nativeness/alienness. While love is common, high levels of suspicion and intolerance towards trees in the suburban context are more common. Our findings confirm and throw further light on previous work indicating that many Australians have very partitioned views of the world in relationto where humans and nonhuman lifeforms belong. This partitioning must be understood in conceptual as well as spatial terms.

Minerva 2005, The Honors College

Minerva

This issue of Minerva includes an article on the development of HON 170: Currents & Contexts; a discussion of the Honors College's "Last Lecture Series;" a reflection on the legacy of former Honors Program Director, Robert Thomson; and an article on the visual art found around the Honors College complex.

Openws-Transaction: Enabling Reliable Web Service Transactions, Ivan Vasquez, John A. Miller, Kunal Verma, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

OpenWS-Transaction is an open source middleware that enables Web services to participate in a distributed transaction as prescribed by the WS-Coordination and WS-Transaction set of specifications. Central to the framework are the Coordinator and Participant entities, which can be integrated into existing services by introducing minimal changes to application code. OpenWS-Transaction allows transaction members to recover their original state in case of operational failure by leveraging techniques in logical logging and recovery at the application level. Depending on transaction style, system recovery may involve restoring key application variables and replaying uncommitted database activity. Transactions are assumed to be defined in …

Obesity, Self-Complexity, And Compartmentalization: On The Implications Of Obesity For Self-Concept Organization, Bruce E. Blaine, C. E. Johnson

Statistics Faculty/Staff Publications

The relationship between obesity and structural aspects of the self-concept was examined in adult women. Participants were 119 adult women [age range: 18-73, M=26.9; body mass index (BMI) range: 16.2-54.7, M=27.3] who completed measures of self-esteem, self-complexity, and the spontaneous self-concept. BMI was associated with less complex and more compartmentalized self-knowledge and more frequent mention of weight-stereotypic traits as self-descriptive. The findings are discussed in the context of research on obesity- related stigma.

Regioselective Synthesis Of Novel E-Edge-[60]Fullerenylmethanodihydropyrroles And 1,2-Dihydromethano[60]Fullerenes, Leila Chaker, Graham E. Ball, James R. Williams, Glenn A. Burley, Bill C. Hawkins, Paul A. Keller, Stephen G. Pyne

Faculty of Science - Papers (Archive)

Treatment of a tethered N-(diphenylmethylene)glycinate-malonate derivative with [60]fullerene under Bingel conditions yielded an e-edge-[60]fullerenylmethanodihydropyrrole adduct in a regioselective manner. The regiochemical outcome was independent of the order of addition of either the N-(diphenylmethylene)glycinate or the malonate moieties. This new bis-adduct was also prepared in 13C enriched form allowing for its unequivocal structural characterization by 2D INADEQUATE NMR experiments. Ring-opening of the dihydropyrrole functionality of the bisadducts under reductive conditions gave exclusively novel dihydromethano[60]fullerene derivatives.

Culture As Concept And Influence In Environmental Research And Management, Lesley M. Head, D. Trigger, J. Mulcock

Faculty of Science - Papers (Archive)

Given that human activities have been implicated in the vast majority of contemporary environmental problems, it might be expected that research effort into those activities and the attitudes from which they stem would be both strongly supported by funding agencies, and of central interest to environmental scientists and land managers. In this paper we focus on an undervalued area of environmental humanities research—cultural analysis of the beliefs, practices and often unarticulated assumptions which underlie human–environmental relations. In discussing how cultural processes are central to environmental attitudes and behaviours, and how qualitative research methods can be used to understand them in …

Radar - A Novel Admission Control And Handoff Management Scheme For Multimedia Leo Satellite Networks, Syed Rashidali Rizvi

Computer Science Theses & Dissertations

Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite networks are deployed as an enhancement to terrestrial wireless networks in order to provide broadband services to users regardless of their location. In addition to global coverage, these satellite systems support communications with hand-held devices and offer low cost-per-minute access cost, making them promising platforms for Personal Communication Services (PCS). LEO satellites are expected to support multimedia traffic and to provide their users with some form of Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees. However, the limited bandwidth of the satellite channel, satellite rotation around the Earth and mobility of end-users makes QoS provisioning and mobility management …

Demonstrating Dynamic Configuration And Execution Of Web Processes, Karthik Gomadam, Kunal Verma, Amit P. Sheth, John A. Miller

Kno.e.sis Publications

Web processes are next generation workflows on the web, created using Web services. In this paper we demonstrate the METEOR-S Configuration and Execution Environment (MCEE) system. It will illustrate the capabilities of the system to a) Discover partners b) Optimize partner selection using constraint analysis, c) Perform interaction protocol and data mediation. A graphical execution monitor to monitor the various phases of execution will be used to demonstrate various aspects of the system.

Discovering Informative Connection Subgraphs In Multi-Relational Graphs, Cartic Ramakrishnan, William Milnor, Matthew Perry, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Discovering patterns in graphs has long been an area of interest. In most approaches to such pattern discovery either quantitative anomalies, frequency of substructure or maximum flow is used to measure the interestingness of a pattern. In this paper we introduce heuristics that guide a subgraph discovery algorithm away from banal paths towards more "informative" ones. Given an RDF graph a user might pose a question of the form: "What are the most relevant ways in which entity X is related to entity Y?" the response to which is a subgraph connecting X to Y. We use our heuristics to …

Autism And Parental Marital Satisfaction: The Role Of Adequacy Of Resources, Geneeta Kaliah Chambers

Loma Linda University Electronic Theses, Dissertations & Projects

The goal of the present study was to expand on the existing literature exploring families with children who have developmental disabilities, particularly autism. Previous studies have been constrained by univariate approaches that have failed to adequately capture the nuances of family functioning. Using an ecological/context approach, stemming from an ongoing research program conducted within a university-based treatment center, the present study attempted to improve on the conceptualization of interrelationships among family members and the role that contextual factors play within that dynamic. Specifically, the present study explored the influence of children’s level of autism on parents’ reports of their marital …

Online Teaching Practices (Both Best And Worst), Michael Nelson, Bhagyavati, Gail Miles, Amber Settle, Dale Shaffer, Jake Watts, Robert P. Webber

Amber Settle

Ontoqa: Metric-Based Ontology Quality Analysis, Samir Tartir, I. Budak Arpinar, Michael Moore, Amit P. Sheth, Boanerges Aleman-Meza

Kno.e.sis Publications

As the Semantic Web gains importance for sharing knowledge on the Internet this has lead to the development and publishing of many ontologies in different domains. When trying to reuse existing ontologies into their applications, users are faced with the problem of determining if an ontology is suitable for their needs. In this paper, we introduce OntoQA, an approach that analyzes ontology schemas and their populations (i.e. knowledgebases) and describes them through a well defined set of metrics. These metrics can highlight key characteristics of an ontology schema as well as its population and enable users to make an informed …

Evidence Of Reduced Measurement Uncertainties From An Ftir Instrument Intercomparison At Kiruna, Sweden, A. Meier, Clare Paton-Walsh, C. Bell, T. Blumenstock, F. Hase, A. Goldman, A. Steen, R. Kift, P. Woods, Y. Kondo

Faculty of Science - Papers (Archive)

We report the results of an intercomparison of vertical column amounts of HCl, HF, N2O, HNO3, CH4, O3, CO2 and N2 derived from the spectra recorded by two ground-based FTIR spectrometers operated side-by-side using the sun as a source. The procedures used to record spectra and derive vertical column amounts followed the format of previous instrument intercomparisons organised by the Network for Detection of Stratospheric Change (NDSC), but the level of agreement achieved was significantly better than for previous intercomparisons. For most gases the differences were typically 1% or less, with at least one of the five datasets showing no …

Semantics For Scientific Experiments And The Web: The Implicit, The Formal And The Powerful, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

No abstract provided.

The Influence Of Reliability On Four Rules For Determining The Number Of Components To Retain, Gibbs Y. Kanyongo

Journal of Modern Applied Statistical Methods

Imperfectly reliable scores impact the performance of factor analytic procedures. A series of Monte Carlo studies was conducted to generate scores with known component structure from population matrices with varying levels of reliability. The scores were submitted to four procedures: Kaiser rule, scree plot, parallel analysis, and modified Horn’s parallel analysis to find if each procedure accurately determines the number of components at the different reliability levels. The performance of each procedure was judged by the percentage of the number of times that the procedure was correct and the mean components that each procedure extracted in each cell. Generally, the …

Large Sample And Bootstrap Intervals For The Gamma Scale Parameter Based On Grouped Data, Ayman Baklizi, Amjad Al-Nasser

Journal of Modern Applied Statistical Methods

Interval estimation of the scale parameter of the gamma distribution using grouped data is considered in this article. Exact intervals do not exist and approximate intervals are needed Recently, Chen and Mi (2001) proposed alternative approximate intervals. In this article, some bootstrap and jackknife type intervals are proposed. The performance of these intervals is investigated and compared. The results show that some of the suggested intervals have a satisfactory statistical performance in situations where the sample size is small with heavy proportion of censoring.

Bootstrap Intervals Of The Parameters Of Lognormal Distribution Using Power Rule Model And Accelerated Life Tests, Mohammed Al-Haj Ebrahem

Journal of Modern Applied Statistical Methods

Assumed that the distribution of the lifetime of any unit follows a lognormal distribution with parameters μ and σ . Also, assume that the relationship between μ and the stress level V is given by the power rule model. Several types of bootstrap intervals of the parameters were studied and their performance was studied using simulations and compared in term of attainment of the nominal confidence level, symmetry of lower and upper error rates and the expected width. Conclusions and recommendations are given.

A Method For Analyzing Unreplicated Experiments Using Information On The Intraclass Correlation Coefficient, Jamis J. Perrett

Journal of Modern Applied Statistical Methods

Many studies are performed on units that cannot be replicated; however, there is often an abundance of subsampling. By placing a reasonable upper bound on the intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC), it is possible to carry out classical tests of significance that have conservative levels of significance.

Jmasm24: Numerical Computing For Third-Order Power Method Polynomials (Excel), Todd C. Headrick

Journal of Modern Applied Statistical Methods

The power method polynomial transformation is a popular procedure used for simulating univariate and multivariate non-normal distributions. It requires software that solves simultaneous nonlinear equations. Potential users of the power method may not have access to commercial software packages (e.g., Mathematica, Fortran). Therefore, algorithms are presented in the more commonly available Excel 2003 spreadsheets. The algorithms solve for (1) coefficients for polynomials of order three, (2) intermediate correlations and Cholesky factorizations for multivariate data generation, and (3) the values of skew and kurtosis for determining if a transformation will produce a valid power method probability density function (pdf). The Excel …

Misconceptions Leading To Choosing The T Test Over The Wilcoxon Mann-Whitney Test For Shift In Location Parameter, Shlomo S. Sawilowsky

Journal of Modern Applied Statistical Methods

There exist many misconceptions in choosing the t over the Wilcoxon Rank-Sum test when testing for shift. Examples are given in the following three groups: (1) false statement, (2) true premise, but false conclusion, and (3) true statement irrelevant in choosing between the t test and the Wilcoxon Rank Sum test.

Second-Order Accurate Inference On Simple, Partial, And Multiple Correlations, Robert J. Boik, Ben Haaland

Journal of Modern Applied Statistical Methods

This article develops confidence interval procedures for functions of simple, partial, and squared multiple correlation coefficients. It is assumed that the observed multivariate data represent a random sample from a distribution that possesses infinite moments, but there is no requirement that the distribution be normal. The coverage error of conventional one-sided large sample intervals decreases at rate 1√n as n increases, where n is an index of sample size. The coverage error of the proposed intervals decreases at rate 1/n as n increases. The results of a simulation study that evaluates the performance of the proposed intervals is …

Inference For P(Y, Vee Ming Ng

Journal of Modern Applied Statistical Methods

Some tests and confidence bounds for the reliability parameter R=P(Y

An Alternative To Warner’S Randomized Response Model, Sat Gupta, Javid Shabbir

Journal of Modern Applied Statistical Methods

A modification to Warner’s (1965) Randomized Response Model is suggested. The suggested model is more efficient than the original model.

Determining Parallel Analysis Criteria, Marley W. Watkins

Journal of Modern Applied Statistical Methods

Determining the number of factors to extract is a critical decision in exploratory factor analysis. Simulation studies have found the Parallel Analysis criterion to be accurate, but it is computationally intensive. Two freeware programs that implement Parallel Analysis on Macintosh and Windows operating systems are presented.

Change Point Estimation Of Bilevel Functions, Leming Qu, Yi-Cheng Tu

Journal of Modern Applied Statistical Methods

Reconstruction of a bilevel function such as a bar code signal in a partially blind deconvolution problem is an important task in industrial processes. Existing methods are based on either the local approach or the regularization approach with a total variation penalty. This article reformulated the problem explicitly in terms of change points of the 0-1 step function. The bilevel function is then reconstructed by solving the nonlinear least squares problem subject to linear inequality constraints, with starting values provided by the local extremas of the derivative of the convolved signal from discrete noisy data. Simulation results show a considerable …