Soils are the largest terrestrial pool of carbon, therefore it is critical to understand
what controls soil carbon efflux to the atmosphere in light of current climate uncertainty.
The primary efflux of carbon from soil is soil respiration which is typically categorized
into autotrophic and heterotrophic respiration. These two components...
I argue that Matthew’s seven acts of corporal mercies provide a means of reading Piers Plowman within a framework familiar to medieval audiences, but also exposes the different models of health that are at work within the poem and the soteriological significance of these healths. In chapter one, I focus...
This project consists of the analysis, design, and manufacturing of the 2016 cooling system for Global Formula Racing’s combustion vehicle. Several water configurations were examined, using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to estimate airflow and heat transfer calculations in MATLAB to estimate heat rejection through each concept. Data used to perform...
Work engagement is demonstrated when employees are involved with, committed to,
enthusiastic, and passionate about their work. The goal of this study was to summarize
relevant information on work engagement, produce a working coding system to identify
evidence of work engagement, and discuss the implications of work engagement on an...
Null networks are a type of random graph that is favored for the analysis of a wide variety of real-world networks, including gene-regulatory networks, food webs, and species co-occurrence matrices. As a hypothesis-generating tool, null networks are invaluable because they can reveal network motifs and unusual large-scale properties of networks...
Wildfires across the Western United States, specifically in California have increased in size and intensity in recent decades. These fires are encroaching on California’s Wildland Urban-Interface (WUI), often with devastating results. Most recently, these destructive results were displayed in the 2018 fire season in the Camp and Carr Fires and...
In this dissertation, a series of studies in the field of terahertz (THz) science are presented, specifically using nonlinear THz spectroscopy. We exploit huge field enhancement and subwavelength confinement in plasmonic structures. There are three distinct projects which will be discussed: nonlinear THz spectroscopy using plasmonic induced transparency (PIT), THz-triggered...
Historically, the difficulty of obtaining pure cultures of abundant marine
microbial plankton has an obstacle to reconstructing the underlying
mechanisms of biogeochemistry in the ocean. While a number of dominant
marine species from the ocean surface have been cultured, the dominant
microbial plankton of the dark ocean proved far more...
Variation in data is abundant and ubiquitous in real-world applications. Managing variation in databases is, however, difficult and has been extensively studied by the database community. Schema evolution, data integration, and database versioning are examples of well-studied forms of database variation with effective context-specific solutions. However, variation appears in different...
In this thesis, I present the variational database management system, a formal framework and its implementation for representing variation in relational databases and managing variational information needs. A variational database is intended to support any kind of variation in a database. Specific kinds of variation in databases have already been...