The "unusual" behavior of agricultural land prices is the subject of considerable debate and controversy and is the object of this research. There is little doubt that land prices have been increasing steadily since 1959 and dramatically throughout the decade of the 1970's. However, there is widespread disagreement among economists,...
The present increasing need for the development of empirical hypotheses that explain the decisionmakers' behavior towards risk is to provide an understanding of the framework within which an industry operates. Such hypotheses could facilitate the implementation of policies designed to solve problems identified within an industry and could also provide...
Gusset plates are an important component of bridges. They are thick sheets of steel that join steel members together using fasteners and also strengthen their joint. Transportation agencies regularly evaluate and rate their inventories of gusset plate connections using visual inspection, which is very costly. To address this issue, we...
Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) communities often use open bug reporting to allow users to participate by reporting bugs. This practice can lead to more duplicate reports, as inexperienced users can be less rigorous about researching existing bug reports. The purpose of this research is to determine the extent of this...
Analysis, visualization, and design of vector fields on surfaces have a wide variety of major applications in both scientific visualization and computer graphics. On the one hand, analysis and visualization of vector fields provide critical insights to the flow data produced from simulation or experiments of various engineering processes. On...
In the field of Human-Computer Interaction, provenance refers to the complete history and genealogy of a document. Provenance can be useful in identifying related resources, such as different versions of the same document or resources used in the creation of a new document. Though methods of provenance collection and applications...
Motion capture data is a digital representation of the complex temporal structure of human motion. Motion capture is widely used for data-driven animation in sports,medicine and entertainment, because of its ability to capture complex and realistic
motions. Due to its efficiency and cost, methods for reusing collections of motion capture...
Field studies indicate that accumulation of finely divided organic
debris in the channels of mountain streams after clearcutting may be
responsible for subsequent reduction in the dissolved oxygen concentration.
The purpose of this study was to quantify the biochemical
oxygen demand (BOD) of Douglas-fir needles and twigs, western
hemlock needles...
Nitrogen (N) fertilizer application can promote nitrate leaching below the rooting zone and into groundwater drinking water sources in many agricultural settings. The proper management of N application can minimize non-point source nitrate pollution to groundwater. This study examines the potential for enhanced efficiency fertilizers, specifically urea treated with a...
In this thesis I present the choice calculus, a formal language for representing variation in software and other structured artifacts. The choice calculus is intended to support variation research in a way similar to the lambda calculus in programming language research. Specifically, it provides a simple formal basis for presenting,...
Commercially bottled, vitamin C-fortified, cranberry
juice cocktail and cranberry-apple (cranapple) juice
drinks were stored at 5°C under simulated home-use
conditions. Ascorbic acid (AA) and dehydroascorbic acid
(DHA) levels were evaluated over a period of seven days by
high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC). Total
vitamin C content was also determined by...
General purpose computer systems have seen increased performance potential through the parallel processing capabilities of multicore processors. Yet this potential performance can only be attained through parallel applications, thus forcing software developers to rethink how everyday applications are designed. The most readily form of Thread Level Parallelism (TLP) within any...
3D datasets acquire great importance in the context of medical imaging. In this thesis we survey and enhance solutions to problems inherently associated with 3D datasets-processing time,noise and visualization. Efforts include development of a tool kit to provide a multi-threaded processing platform to cut processing time, produce real time visualization...
The selection process for map projections is a mystery to many mapmakers and GIS users. Map projections ought to be selected based on the map’s geographic extent and the required distortion properties, with the goal of minimizing the distortion of the mapped area. Despite some available selection guidelines, the selection...
Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a devastating disease characterized by the progressive degeneration of motor neurons. Dominantly-inherited mutations to the antioxidant enzyme Cu,Zn superoxide dismutase (SOD1) cause 3-6% of all ALS cases. The complete mechanism behind the toxicity of mutant SOD1 remains unclear, although significant evidence points to aberrant or...
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...
A novel type of model substrates, i.e. immobilized p-aminophenyl-β-D-cellooligosaccharides,
was developed and used in the study of exocellulases. The
two major cellobiohydrolases from Trichoderma reesei, CBH I and CBH II were
used as representative enzymes. p-Aminophenyl derivatives of cellobiose (PAPG₂),
cellotriose (PAPG₃), and cellotetraose (PAPG₄) were synthesized from the reaction...
While there are many ways to evaluate a user interface design, the user's mental workload and situation awareness (SA) are particularly important considerations in the supervisory control of safety-critical systems. Typically, operators of these systems must monitor high-volume, time-sensitive status information. Interface design for this domain can be challenging and...
The development of new technologies in science is a balance between existence and use. There are three versions of this duality – something is built and users come, something is built and users don’t come, and, finally, potential users show up but the ballpark has not yet been built. In...
Studies towards the total synthesis of (−)-kendomycin (1), a bacterial metabolite with
a unique molecular architecture and pronounced biological activity, are described. These
studies resulted in the synthesis of advanced intermediate 208, containing all of the
carbon atoms of 1.
A Dötz annulation between alkyne 122 and novel chromium carbenoid...