Improving the methods used for the detection and estimation of fissile material mass content is essential to nuclear security and safeguards to ensure special nuclear material (SNM) accountability, control, safety and security. With the continued expansion of the nuclear industry and the need for safe management of spent fuel, improving...
A stochastic process is given by a family of random variables indexed by elements of a set. We have considered stochastic processes of three different types, each involving an associated martingale structure. Martingale is a sequence of random variables for which the conditional expectation at a certain time point given...
Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) are the de-facto formalism for studying sequential decision making problems with uncertainty, ranging from classical problems such as inventory control and path planning, to more complex problems such as reservoir control under rainfall uncertainty and emergency response optimization for fire and medical emergencies. Most prior research...
Marine bivalves are globally recognized as ecologically and commercially valuable species and, for over a century, researchers have been studying their feeding, digestion and other related physiological processes. These studies have shown that marine bivalves have complex feeding and particle processing behaviors to maximize growth in dynamic environmental conditions. Additionally,...
Since the discovery of penicillin in 1928, the fungal kingdom has remained a fertile source for the discovery of new, biologically active, natural products. Further, as natural products continue to be discovered from fungi, a deeper understanding of the critical role of specialized metabolism in fungal ecology is afforded. The...
Westward transport of water vapor across the Panama Isthmus helps to
maintain the salinity contrast between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, important in
thermohaline circulation and global climate. Relatively low sea-surface salinities and a
strong, shallow pycnocline in the eastern Pacific warm pool (EPWP) region near
Central America reflect high...
Periodic determinations of plasma hormone levels suggested that changes in interrenal activity are unrelated to changes in thyroidal or gonadal activity during development (smoltification) of juvenile coho salmon (Oncorhynchus kisutch). Moreover, in an experiment where fish were reared under various conditions of crowding and water inflow rate, it appeared that...
The purpose of this study was to determine the impact a narrative reflecting team experience has on counselor self-efficacy. Through a quasi-experimental design, the use of a narrative reflecting team supervision model was compared to supervision as usual with graduate counseling students (N=12). The Counselor Self-Estimate Inventory (COSE) was chosen...
A seasonal hair-loss syndrome of native deer began to occur in the Pacific Northwest United States in the mid-1990s. Clinical manifestations of the disease typically include large numbers of chewing lice on Columbia Black-tailed deer (Odocoileus hemionus columbianus) and Columbia White-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus leucurus). Expenditure of energy responding to...
The Southern Ocean plays an important role in the ocean’s uptake of heat and carbon yet the processes controlling this uptake are not well understood. To date, more than 100 biogeochemical profiling floats that measure water column pH, oxygen, nitrate, fluorescence, and backscattering at 10-day intervals have been deployed throughout...