There is a large and growing market for portable consumer audio products
with very small size. As the size of these products is reduced, the area occupied
by batteries becomes significant and hence limits the number of batteries to one.
In order to build such small products, high levels of...
Functional programming is concerned with referential transparency, that is, given a certain function and its parameter, that the result will always be the same. However, it seems that this is violated in applications involving uncertainty, such as rolling a dice. This thesis defines the background of probabilistic programming and domain-specific...
Molecular genetic and enzymological techniques have been employed to study antibiotic biosynthesis. In this thesis, we studied the formation and modification of the nonproteinogenic amino acid enduracididine (End), which exists in two important antibiotics, mannopeptimycins (MPPs) and enduracidin.
Sequence analysis of the MPP gene cluster revealed that the product of...
Despite the importance of tropical forest ecosystems in the global carbon cycle, there have been few studies of carbon dynamics in this biome. The magnitude of carbon stocks in the tropics and their changes over time are poorly known since ground-based observations are lacking. In this study, total carbon stocks...
The objective of this research is to determine the correlation of lacustrine micro-fossils in Lake Tanganyika to changes in climate and lake levels during the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene.
Lake Tanganyika is the second deepest and one of the oldest lakes in the world. The horst and graben geometry...
This study investigated variation in xylem anatomy, hydraulic properties, and the relationship between anatomy and properties within Douglas-fir trees at multiple scales. The hierarchical scales in the study included fertilization treatments (fertilized and unfertilized), trees within the treatments, and positions within the trees. Tracheid diameter, tracheid length, percent latewood, number...
1-km MODIS observations of ship tracks off the west coast of the U.S. are used to characterize changes in cloud visible optical depths, cloud droplet radii, cloud cover fraction, and column cloud liquid water amount as low-level marine clouds respond to particle pollution from underlying ships. This study re-examines the...
The northern goshawk (Accipiter gentilis) is a species of concern in the western United States due to its association with mature structural stage forests. I employed a use-versus-availability study design to quantify the vegetative, physiographic, and landscape variables associated with goshawk breeding habitat selection in the San Juan Mountains of...
Full dynamic control of physically simulated characters is the holy grail of video
games and other interactive applications. Recent advances in the field have
presented controllers that can handle the balance and fall response after a
collision. This thesis addresses the development of a controller that handles the
response before...
First introduced to the USA in 1958, Myxobolus cerebralis, the parasite responsible for whirling disease in salmonids, has since spread across the country causing severe declines in wild trout populations in the intermountain west. Recent development of risk assessment models used to assess the likelihood and consequences of exotic parasite...