Simulated Annealing and Threshold Accepting are two stochastic search algorithms that have been successfully used on a variety of complex and difficult problem sets. Due to their stochastic nature they are not guaranteed to produce the same result for each run. This means that these techniques actually produce a distribution...
The purpose of this study is to fill a critical gap in brand equity literature by proposing and empirically testing a brand equity process model for unfamiliar Asian brands. Cue utilization theory (Easterbrook, 1959) and impression formation theory (Asch, 1946) were integrated to explain how extrinsic and intrinsic cues shown...
Online shopping is one of the fastest growing forms of shopping with sales reaching $141.4 billion in 2004 (Shop.org, 2005). With the tremendous growth of online retailing, and the prevalence of impulse buying today, this study's purpose was to investigate the internal and external factors of impulse buying in an...
The subaerial beach, composed of sand dunes and the foreshore, provides a natural buffer zone between vulnerable land and the dissipation of storm wave energy due to wave breaking. The natural beauty of this region is attractive to people, and as a result, significant investment has been placed in this...
Chemicals must be bioavailable for there to be a potential for exposure and consequent risk to human or environmental health. Passive sampling devices (PSDs) are used to quantify the time-integrated concentration of bioavailable contaminants. We demonstrate that PSDs can be paired with the zebrafish developmental toxicity bioassay to produce site-specific,...
The optimal allocation of buffers in serial production systems is one of the oldest and most researched problems in Industrial Engineering. In general, there are three main approaches to the buffer allocation problem when the objective is to maximize throughput. The first is basically a systematic trial and error procedure...
North American cultivation of Ribes L. may expand as small fruit growers seek species to diversify horticultural crops. The Ribes industry was suppressed for decades out of fear that cultivated black currants and gooseberries would intensify the fungal disease white pine blister rust (WPBR) on five-needle pine (Pinus L. section...
Contaminants can exist in a wide range of states in aqueous environments, especially in surface waters. They can be freely dissolved or associated with dissolved or particulate organic matter depending on their chemical and physical characteristics. The freely dissolved fraction represents the most bioavailable fraction to an organism. These freely...
Genetic variability in natural populations of Douglas-fir was
studied at molecular level by investigating the variations of some
primary gene products, i. e. enzymes. Using the techniques of disc
gel electrophoresis and biochemical staining, the isoenzyme patterns
of leucine aminopeptidase, esterase and glutamate oxaloacetate
transaminase are characterized in young seedlings...
The seasonal distribution of bioavailable organochiorine contaminants in surface
water and the potential environmental factors influencing their bioavailability were
evaluated. The study was carried at the lower Willamette River at Portland Harbor, Oregon
where surface water runoff varied according to season. Bioavailable water concentrations of
DDTs and PCBs were determined...
Silicone wristbands are easy-to-wear passive samplers that have been readily adapted into environmental health studies since first reported in 2014. Wristbands can be worn during normal daily activities and sequester a wide range of bioavailable organic chemicals. This dissertation includes a thorough review of silicone wristband technology, as well as...
Exposure assessment is necessary to determine the frequency and magnitude of environmental contaminants, especially since exposure may lead to adverse health outcomes. Traditional personal exposure assessment tools such as biological samples are limited in their ability to capture a wide range of chemical exposures from a single sample, and others...
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Kim A. Anderson
Exposure assessment is necessary to determine the frequency and magnitude
The Otago (CRA 7) and Southland (CRA 8) regions are managed with distinct individual transferable quotas (ITQs) as part of the New Zealand quota management system (QMS). However, for assessment purposes, they are considered as a single stock known as the NSS (North-South Islands - South) rock lobster stock. Currently,...
Since the "200 miles" fishery conservation zones
were established by some coastal countries, new arrangements
between countries to participate jointly in
fishing, processing, and marketing of fish products
have emerged. One such fish product is surimi. As a
result of extended jurisdiction, each coastal country's
interest in the surimi industry...
Expert systems have been suggested as a solution
for difficult problems, including FMS scheduling. As
one of the aspects of artificial intelligence (AI), expert
systems have achieved considerable success in recent
years in medical science, chemistry, and engineering.
However, building an expert system is a difficult
task, the most crucial...
The objective of this research project was to identify the limitations associated
with schedule-based Material Requirements Planning (SBMRP) and to
present a knowledge-based expert system (KBES) approach to solve these problems.
In SBMRP, the basic strategy is to use backward or forward scheduling
based on an arbitrary dispatching rule, such...
The major obstacle to widespread parallel programming of multiprocessors is the lack of a convenient parallel programming system. PPSE (Parallel Programming Support Environment) is a unified approach to parallel programming. Parallax is developed as a component of PPSE based on ELGDF which is a graphical language for designing parallel programs....
White electroluminescence (EL) was observed for the
first time from diamond-like carbon (DLC) films at room
temperature. Electroluminescence was observed by the
application of ac voltages in excess of 200 V to a metal-insulator-
semiconductor (i.e. DLC)-insulator-metal (MISIM)
device structure.
For EL applications, three types of the DLC films were...
For manufacturing and service industries to stay competitive in this rapidly changing, globalized world, one of the most important operations, and one that many businesses struggle to plan and manage efficiently, is material handling. There has been a large amount of research on various vehicle routing problems (VRPs) in recent...
Hydrocarbon solvents are widely used in the production of paints, adhesives, dyes, polymers, plastics, textiles, printing inks, agricultural products and pharmaceuticals. While the neuropathic potential of aliphatic solvents was shown in the 1970s, little is known about the neuropathic potential of aromatic solvents. The present study examines such solvents, 1,2-diethylbenzene...
A perfectly matched layer (PML) is widely used to model many different types of wave propagation in different media. It has been found that a PML is often very effective and also easy to set, but still many questions remain.
We introduce a new formulation from regularizing the classical Un-Split...
The research undertaken consisted of the study of three topics
affecting the performance of asphalt concrete mixtures, that is, mixing
moisture, oxidative aging and higher tire pressures and axle loads.
This thesis presents the findings of the research comprising these
three topics.
In the first study, the effects of mixing...
This study is aimed at evaluating the effectiveness of buyback program implemented last during a 10-year period using a bioeconomic model. Aggregate fisheries stocks are assessed by the surplus-production model and standardized aggregate harvest function is used in the bioeconomic model. The simulation result indicate that the fish stocks are...
The first objective of this paper is to prove the existence and uniqueness of global solutions for
a Kirchhoff-type wave equation with
nonlinear dissipation of the form Kuⁿ + 𝑀(|𝐴¹/²𝑢|²)𝐴𝑢 + 𝑔(𝑢')=0 under suitable
assumptions on 𝐾, 𝐴, 𝑀(⋅), and 𝑔(⋅). Next, we under some growth conditions on the nonlinear...
In recent years, there has been an increased interest in accurately measuring physical activity levels with accelerometers. Two distinct approaches have been used to estimate physical activity levels with accelerometers are vertical axis activity counts and vector magnitude (VM). Although previous studies evaluated these two distinct approaches for individuals without...
Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii (Mirb.) Franco) is one of the world's most important and valuable timber trees. Its natural distribution in North America resembles an inverted V with uneven sides. From the apex in British Columbia, the western half extends along the Pacific mountain ranges into California for about 2,200 km...
The pathogenic nematodes Pratylenchus neglectus (Rensch, 1924) Filipjev and Schuurmans Stekhoven, 1941 and Pratylenchus thornei Sher and Allen, 1953 cause severe yield losses in wheat (Triticum aestivum L.). The objectives in this study were to assay a collection of Iranian landrace accessions collected from 12 provinces in Iran to identify...
Full Text:
. Smiley, Timothy C. Paulitz, and Kim Garland-Campbell
ABSTRACT
The pathogenic nematodes Pratylenchus
The evolution of the near-inertial internal wavefield from ice-free summertime conditions to ice-covered wintertime conditions is examined using data from a yearlong deployment of six moorings on the Beaufort continental slope from August 2008 to August 2009. When ice is absent, from July to October, energy is efficiently transferred from...
The emerging field of nanotechnology strictly requires the micro-scaling of the available separation technology and the design of novel devices for separations of molecules of interest. The separation of proteins and nanoparticles is challenging due to their relatively large size, non-specific adherence to surfaces and instability in many solvents.
This...
Survival of marine fishes during their early life history stage is tightly related to prey availability and predation pressure. Yet, our understanding of how individual larvae to entire assemblages are constrained by these factors is limited. We integrated biological sampling of larval fishes with fine-scale in situ imaging to relate...
Stock loss and out-of-stocks are outcomes of poorly designed inventory management systems and can lead to significant revenue losses. Inventory management systems (IMS) based on radio frequency identification (RFID) have the potential to minimize these losses if they are properly designed and deployed. However, the placement of RFID readers to...
Emergence of highly accurate Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) with the capability to process large datasets, has led to their popularity in many applications, including safety/security-sensitive (e.g. disease recognition, self-driving cars). Despite the high accuracy of convolutional neural networks, they have been found to be susceptible to adversarial noise added to...
Large quantities of the chemical oil dispersant Corexit were applied in the Gulf of Mexico (Gulf) in response to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Large data gaps regarding the potential transport, persistence and impact of Corexit in the Gulf existed at the time of the emergency response. Analytical methods for...
In supervised learning, label information can be provided at different levels of granularity. For small datasets, it is possible to acquire a label for each data instance. However, in the big-data regime, this fine granularity approach is prohibitively costly. For example, in semi-supervised learning, only a limited number of samples...
Artificial collectives are useful for accomplishing tasks that require teamwork from multiple simple robots. Multiple robot and collective testbeds have been developed, yet none stay committed to leverage the local interactions, group size, and imperfect information assumptions that strengthen biological collectives. A review of the collective and multiple robot literature,...
The biogeochemical processes that occur in marine sediments on continental margins are complex; however, from one perspective they can be considered with respect to three geochemical zones based on the presence and form of methane: sulfate-methane transition (SMTZ), gas hydrate stability zone (GHSZ), and free gas zone (FGZ). These geochemical...
We present a kinetic model based upon pore water data collected from eight sites drilled
during the second Ulleung Basin gas hydrate drilling expedition (UBGH2) in 2010.
Three sites were drilled at locations where acoustic chimneys were identified in seismic
data, and the rest were drilled on non-chimney (i.e. background)...
Full Text:
W-L, Holland M, Park M-H, Choi J & Kim G-Y 662
(2013b) Depressurization experiment of pressure
Polymorphonuclear leukocytes (PMN) from patients with chronic granulomatous disease (CGD) fail to produce microbicidal concentrations of reactive oxygen species (ROS) due to mutations in NOX2. Patients with CGD suffer from severe, life-threatening infections and inflammatory complications. Granulibacter bethesdensis is an emerging Gram-negative pathogen in CGD that resists killing by PMN...
It is a golden age for animal movement studies and so an opportune time to assess priorities for future work. We assembled 40 experts to identify key questions in this field, focussing on marine megafauna, which include a broad range of birds, mammals, reptiles, and fish. Research on these taxa...
Community college and university faculty members changing their practice of teaching have reported benefits to participating in peer support within communities of practice that offer an online knowledge sharing space. The ability of such online knowledge sharing to provide opportunities for collaborative knowledge building has made fostering a viable online...
The distribution of mobile marine predators often reflects underlying dynamic ecological processes. The geographical focus of this PhD is the South Taranaki Bight (STB) of New Zealand, where wind-driven coastal upwelling generates productivity and prey to support a blue whale foraging ground. The STB is also New Zealand’s most industrial...
Pursuit of the triple bottom line of economic, community and ecological sustainability has increased the complexity of fishery management; fisheries assessments require new types of data and analysis to guide science-based policy in addition to traditional biological information and modeling. We introduce the Fishery Performance Indicators (FPIs), a broadly applicable...
Improvements in instrumentation for fluorometric kinetic
measurements and the application of a new intensified diode array (IDA)
rapid scanning system to low level transient fluorescence measurements
are reported. This instrumentation is applied to a new fluorometric
kinetic method for thiamine (TM).
Modifications to the existing fluorometric reation rate instrument
include...
Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have generated considerable excitement and considerable skepticism since their recent inception (e.g., Kim, 2014; Perna et al., 2014). By fall 2015, approximately 35 million people had participated in 4200 courses offered by over 550 institutions (Shah, 2015). In addition to MOOCs’ potential for expanding access...
Human development researchers consider adolescence a rich time for interest development and identity exploration. A relatively new movement in the Free-Choice Learning (FCL) arena, the Maker movement, offers learners interest-driven, experiential, often collaborative, and process-oriented activities ranging from game design (computer-based and otherwise) and robotics, to sewing LEDs into clothing...