It is possible to purchase, for as little as $10,000, a cluster of computers with the capability to rival the supercomputers of only a few years ago. Now, users that have little to no experience developing distributed applications or managing a cluster are in a position to do so. To...
In order to investigate potential climate impacts on landscape-scale ecosystem processes, I implemented a dynamic general vegetation model (DGVM) over a large domain in northern California and western Nevada on a rectangular grid of ca. 800-meter spatial resolution. I used 100 years of observed, monthly climate and nine future climate...
We took the back-propagation algorithms of Werbos for recurrent and feed-forward neural networks and implemented them on machines with graphics processing units (GPU). The parallelism of these units gave our implementations a 10 to 100 fold increase in speed. For nets with less than 20 neurons the machine performed faster...
Wildland fires are an increasingly extensive, expensive, and frequent occurrence in dry forests of the western United States. Fuel reduction treatments are designed to reduce extreme fire behavior, promote resilient forest structure, and facilitate fire control efforts. Although there is widespread recognition that repeated treatments are needed to maintain desired...
This study examines a limited number of selected themes in
Judeo-Christian, or Western, religious thought and their implications
for man's use of land, with the objective of discovering the influence
of Western religion on attitudes toward nature and land.
Five themes are examined: dominion of man; stewardship; contempt
for, and...
Research was carried out to determine the influence of increasing
the percentage base saturation of the soil on the yield of
the commercial strawberry. It was found that the effect of increasing
the bases in the soils was directly related to the original
percentage base saturation. When this original value...
This work consolidates from many sources features of the fresh frozen shrimp industry in terms of its product volume, value, growth trends and position relative to other Oregon seafood commodities. Market structure and functions are described as the product moves from the fisherman through the processor, broker, wholesaler and retailer...
This project addresses the problems of manually placing facial landmarks on a portrait and finding a fast way to warp the annotated image of a face. While there are many approaches to automatically find facial landmarks, most of them provide insufficient results in uncontrolled environments. Thus I introduce a method...