The number of endangered species is rapidly increasing while paucity of adequate information and resources delays establishment of conservation actions. The IUCN’s listing system is insufficient to determine conservation priorities and many species lack information even to be evaluated (i.e., “data deficient”). Here I proposed and tested the Rapid Endangered...
About 48 million cases of Foodborne illnesses (FBIs) are estimated to occur every year in the US. These are diseases caused by contamination of foods with bacteria, viruses, protozoa, parasites and toxic chemicals. Clostridium difficile infections (CDIs) are an important health-care and community associated problem. Since C. difficile spores have...
Police officers are frequently viewed as being unable
to perform the duties assigned to them by society.
Criticism has focused on inappropriate reaction to social
unrest and an inability to control crime. Improving the
selection process of police officers has been proposed as
an appropriate means of improving police officer...
Software systems are becoming an essential part of the lives of both individuals and organizations, and as a consequence, these systems are getting bigger and more complex. Because of this, the tasks of maintaining the quality in these complex software systems are becoming increasingly difficult. Furthermore, these systems are subject...
Merge conflicts have long plagued software development. With larger and more dispersed teams comes greater risk of developers working on the same code at the same time. While merge conflicts are known to be painful, their exact impact on software is still largely unknown. Are merge conflicts an isolated problem,...
Italian ryegrass growth and production from
positionally selective applications and sublethal rates of a
nonselective herbicide were compared to growth and
production when treated with diuron applied preemergence as
a broadcast treatment and safened by activated carbon
applied over the crop row. In the positionally selective
treatments, herbicide spray was...
This dissertation addresses the problem of recognizing human activities in videos. Our focus is on activities with stochastic structure, where the activities are characterized by variable space-time arrangements of actions, and conducted by a variable number of actors. These activities occur frequently in sports and surveillance videos. They may appear...
A bad software development process leads to wasted effort and inferior products. In order to improve a software process, it must be first understood. In this work I focus on understanding software processes.
The first process we seek to understand is Continuous Integration (CI). CI systems automate the compilation, building,...
The study of the diversity of multivariate objects shares common characteristics across disciplines, including ecology and organizational management. Nevertheless, experts in these two disciplines have adopted somewhat separate diversity concepts and analysis techniques, limiting the ability of potentially sharing and cross comparing these concerns. Moreover, while complex diversity data may...
Professional software engineers have an arsenal of techniques such as unit testing and assertions to check their specifications, but these techniques require tools, motivation, experience and training that programmers without professional software engineering training may not have. As a result, professionals in other fields, such as scientific modelers, face greater...
Covering half of South America, Brazil is one of the largest agricultural and commercial forest producers globally, with a correspondingly complex road network necessary to support the production and marketing processes of such goods. Contrary to global statistics, almost 90% of the country’s road network is classified as unsealed or...
The methodology to perform bioequivalence studies for prodrug products has not been finalized by FDA leaving the investigators to speculate over the proper approach. This study innovatively utilized the bootstrap methods for testing in vivo bioequivalence on both parent drug and metabolite of four prodrug products: Clopidogrel, Prednisone, Allopurinol, and...
Researchers rely on bioeconomic models to guide research and generate fishery management advice for commercial fisheries. Due partly to a paradigm shift towards ecosystem based fishery management, increasing complexity in the characteristics of the problems has meant that bioeconomic simulation models are becoming more prevalent in the fisheries literature. However...
The Thurstone-Mosteller and Bradley-Terry Models are commonly used to rank items from paired comparisons experiments in which one item in each pair "wins," and to assess the importance of time-independent explanatory variables on such rankings. The first part of this thesis clarifies the use of probit and logistic regression models...
In this dissertation, the structure and electronic properties of multiple metal oxide thin films are characterized and presented. Prompt inorganic condensation (PIC) of metal-oxo and –hydroxo clusters was evaluated as a technique for making metal oxide clusters in two separate studies. The first focuses on the synthesis of lithium niobate...
In this dissertation we consider two application specific flow and transport models in porous media at multiple scales: 1) methane gas transport models for hydrate formation and dissociation in the subsurface under two-phase conditions, and 2) coupled flow and biomass-nutrient model for biofilm growth in complex geometries with biofilm, and...
Post-secondary education institutions across the United States are increasingly allocating resources to promote international education exchange programs as a pedagogical praxis to develop students into global citizens. Underlying such notions of global citizenship is the assumption that students will also develop a stronger post-national or cosmopolitan identity as a result...
This analysis of Colombia's System of National Park Reservations
accomplishes four objectives: 1) The historical development of national
parks in Colombia was described; 2) The status, as of August,
1974, of the areas administered by the Colombian Renewable Natural
Resources Development Institute (INDERENA) was summarized; 3) An
analysis of major...