In many on-campus classes, collaborative projects engage students in shared creative experiences. Verbal and nonverbal interactions within the classroom provide lessons in group decision-making, brainstorming, teamwork, and leadership. This type of interaction is more challenging for students taking online classes. Virtual Reality (VR) can potentially be an alternative to this...
Groundwater overdraft in the Wilcox Groundwater Basin, as a consequence of increasing rates of agricultural groundwater withdrawal, has led to significant regional groundwater level decline and threatens to undermine the basin’s long-term water resource security. Updated characterization of the basin’s water resource conditions and agricultural water demand is critically important...
The project aims at building an application that would simulate a transparency that can either be overlaid on top of the graphical display of another application or used as a stand-alone by accepting input from a keyboard or a mouse to enhance a presentation. The project provides an environment to...
Haiti is far from achieving the UN goal of sanitation access for all; 20% Haitians have no sanitation access, and less than 0.1% of urban excreta is safely managed. Container-Based Sanitation (CBS) may be a key tool for achieving equitable sanitation coverage in Haiti’s cities. CBS is a sanitation strategy...
In this expanded new edition of Living with Earthquakes, Robert Yeats, a leading authority on earthquakes in California and the Pacific Northwest, describes the threat posed by the Cascadia Subduction Zone, a great earthquake fault which runs for hundreds of miles offshore from British Columbia to northern California. New research...
Arctic warming is exposing thawing permafrost to repeated freeze-thaw, a disruptive process that can alter soil biogeochemistry and physical structure. To investigate the impact of permafrost exposure to freeze-thaw, soil response was tested across three scales: 2.5 cm³ aggregates, a forested hillslope, and two sites at contrasting latitudes. XCT imaging...
Resilient interdependent critical infrastructures (CIs) can better withstand cascading failures in disruptive events. This study proposes network expansion as a resilience improvement strategy for interdependent CIs and evaluates the influence of topology in interdependent network design for resilience optimization under disruption uncertainty. A resilience score consisting of network complexity and...
The production of novel hybrid zones is an ecologically important consequence of globally increasing rates of species introductions and invasions. Interspecific hybridization can facilitate gene flow between parent species or produce novel taxa that may alter invasion dynamics or ecosystem services. The coastal sand dunes of the U.S. Pacific Northwest...
Today, there are six extant species of sea lion around the world, with the seventh (the Japanese sea lion) already having gone extinct due to a lack of proper conservation management. Because each of the surviving 6 sea lion species differ slightly in their anatomy, behavior, reproduction, and local habitats,...
This paper describes Schemer, a hierarchical software architecture for Real Time problem solving. Real time applications must be able to react to critical events quickly, and be able to explore simultaneous solutions in response to, or, in anticipation of such events.
Schemer, which is a Blackboard-like architecture, addresses the aforementioned...