Most tsunami studies have been conducted based on the incompressible fluid theory. However water compressibility must be considered for the process of tsunami generation by bottom displacements during submarine earthquakes. During the 2003 Tokachi-Oki earthquake, the ocean-bottom pressure variations were registered by the pressure gauges PG1 and PG2 located right...
Seafood inspection and certification has become a trend on international trade. Recent incidences of chemical residues were examined in exporting seafood products which hinder the future export to the European Union and Japan particularly. Hence, the perceptions of seafood quality and safety from a consumer point of view and international...
An understanding of natural coastal hazards is essential for improving resilience of coastal communities. Effective management of coastal hazards relies on prediction tools and mitigation structures that have been designed to handle the dynamic coastal system. This dissertation is a collection of manuscripts that cover a diverse range of fundamental...
To better understand the extreme local amplification of tsunami, the experimental investigation on counter-propagating solitary wave collisions over a horizontal bottom was conducted using the optical measurement techniques: Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV), and Laser Induced Fluoresce (LIF). Head-on collisions and oblique collisions of equal-amplitude as well as unequal-amplitude waves were...
Reflection of an obliquely incident solitary wave at a vertical wall is studied experimentally in the laboratory wave tank. Precision measurements of water-surface variations are achieved with the aid of laser-induced fluorescent (LIF) technique and detailed temporal and spatial features of the
Mach reflection are captured. During the development stage...
Numerical results are presented using a higher-order pseudo-spectral method in order to solve the Zakharov-Craig-Sulem formulation of the Euler model. We study the effects of variable bathymetry on weakly-dispersive, weakly-nonlinear, shallow water waves. Improved predictions on wave amplitude and shoaling behavior are developed by analytical means in the context of...
According to Engel, Blackwell, and Miniard (1993), evaluative criteria is defined as "the standards and specifications used by consumers to compare different products and brands" (p.51). Many studies have investigated factors that might influence the importance of clothing evaluative criteria used by consumers in the decision making process. However, few...
The purpose of this study was to explore factors
which influence Taiwanese vocational teachers'
participation in program evaluations, use of evaluative
results and, in turn, program improvement. Twelve
Taiwanese public vocational high school teachers were
interviewed during February and March 1992. To confirm
the responses of the teachers, 12 school...
Glucocorticoids are growth-inhibiting steroids. They have been reported to reduce
muscle growth by reducing protein synthesis. However, their actions on muscle protein
degradation remain equivocal. Glucocorticoids have been reported to transiently increase
muscle protein degradation, to not affect this process and to reduce muscle protein
degradation. Reasons for these conflicting...
The objective of our study was to investigate the effect of selenium on
selenoprotein W. Western blot analysis indicated that selenoprotein W is present in
muscle, brain, testis and spleen of rat tissues. Tissue distribution of selenoprotein W
was not altered in rats fed various selenium levels. Among muscle, brain,...
Several procedures for isolating ribosomes from the fat body
of female cockroaches are described and evaluated. The addition
of deoxycholate or Triton X-100 to the homogenizing medium rather
than to the postmitochondrial supernatant was an important factor
in improving the yield of ribosomes.
The fat body ribosomes were characterized and...
Control of high-speed, light-weight robotic manipulators is a challenge because of their special dynamic characteristics. In this work, a two-stage control algorithm for the position control of flexible manipulators is proposed. First, the more complex, flexible robot system is replaced by a simplified hypothetical rigid body system (HRRA) with off-line...
To satisfy the desires of consumers in global markets for new products, it is essential that the cross-cultural differences in product acceptance are understood. An important aspect in cross-cultural research is the measurement tool of product acceptance. The most common scale for acceptance testing is the 9-point hedonic scale that...
This research was designed to study the perinatal and
postweaning effects of the interaction between ethanol and low
dietary zinc during gestation and lactation in the rat.
Pregnant rats were fed liquid diets containing either 2 or 10
μg zinc/ml with or without 30% of kcal from ethanol throughout
gestation...
With the use of a higher-order Euler formulation, we numerically study the reflection of an obliquely incident solitary wave at a vertical wall and compare results with the higher-order Kadomtsev-Petviashvili theory. A maximum amplification of 3.91 is achieved along the wall, nearly realizing the fourfold prediction by Miles (J. Fluid...
Collisions of counter-propagating solitary waves are investigated experimentally.
Precision measurements of water-surface profiles are made with the use of the laser
induced fluorescence (LIF) technique. During the collision, the maximum wave
amplitude exceeds that calculated by the superposition of the incident solitary waves,
and agrees well with both the asymptotic...
Wave runup is an important physical process that affects nearshore sediment transport, coastal erosion, and flooding. Large and unexpected runup events can also be dangerous to beach goers. Extreme runup statistics are essential parameters used in engineering design of marine structures and in coastal management. Although the study of runup...
The 2004 Indian Ocean and 2011 Tohoku tsunami events have shown the destructive power of tsunami inundation to the constructed environment in addition to the tragic loss of life. A comparable event is expected for the Cascadia Subduction Zone (CSZ) which will impact the west coast of North America. Research...
Sports analytics is rapidly evolving today through the use of computer vision systems that automatically extract huge amount of information inherently present in multimedia data without much human assistance. This information can facilitate a better understanding of patterns and strategies in various sports. However, for non-professional teams, due to expense...
In an enhancement-mode, n-channel (p-channel) oxide thin-film transistor (TFT), current arises as a consequence of electron (hole)
transport within a narrow accumulation layer. The square-law model accurately describes enhancement-mode TFT behavior and
establishes the equations appropriate for carrier mobility extraction. In contrast, in a depletion-mode oxide TFT, carrier transport
can...
This thesis presents the details of a large-scale laboratory experiment to study the runup velocity on a complex 3D bathymetry. The PIV measurements including the instrumental setup, the recording procedure, and the image processing are presented. Tsunami inundation directly affects the coastal population and is one of the most important...
The understanding and prediction how coastal wetland vegetation attenuates wave action has received renewed attention with global climate change impacts and increasing populations on coastlines. Conventional attenuation models utilize empirical drag coefficients, but these coefficients exhibit a wide range of values, and there is some uncertainty in the relative importance...
End-user programmers, because they are human, make mistakes. However, past research has not considered how visual end-user debugging devices could be designed to ameliorate the effects of mistakes. This paper empirically examines oracle mistakes mistakes users make about which values are right and which are wrong to reveal differences in...
Previous research has revealed gender differences that impact females’ willingness to adopt software features in end users’ programming environments. Since these features have separately been shown to help end users problem solve, it is important to female end users’ productivity that we find ways to make these features more acceptable...
The near-surface region of a coastal sediment bed is complex and dynamic. At some sites, near-surface sediment deposits are susceptible to extreme events, such as tsunamis or other large overflows, which induce high shear stresses on the sediment bed. The specific properties of sediment beds subjected to such extreme loading...
Asymmetric tensor fields present new challenges for visualization techniques such as hyperstreamline placement and glyph packing. This is because the physical behaviors of the tensors are fundamentally different inside real domains where eigenvalues are real and complex domains where eigenvalues are complex. We present a hybrid visualization approach in which...
The finite element software framework, OpenSees, has been used by researchers
to simulate the response of structural and geotechnical systems to earthquake loading. Implementation of the Particle Finite Element Method (PFEM) has made it possible to simulate hydrodynamic forces through fluid-structure interaction (FSI) in OpenSees. To validate the FSI implementation...
This thesis presents a novel approach for propagation of uncertainty in river systems. Errors in data observations and predictions (e.g., stream inflows), in model parameters, and resulting from the discretization of continuous systems, all point to the need to accurately quantify the amount of uncertainty carried through the modeling process....
This dissertation has focused on the charateristics of bubbles generated by breaking waves and the feedback of wave-current interaction on the forcing mechanism of low frequency wave especially basin seiching wave. For the first study, Optical image capture observations of breaking waves in a laboratory surf zone are presented. The...
The safety of coastal infrastructure has been a concern after the Indian Ocean Tsunami in 2004 and the Great East Japan Tsunami in 2011. The western coast of the United States is also exposed to tsunami hazards due to the Cascadia subduction zone. Therefore, it is critical to design coastal...
An experiment on solitary wave impact on a vertical cylinder was conducted in the three-dimensional wave basin at the Oregon State University Hinsdale Wave Research Laboratory. The cylinder was designed using mechanic principles and finite element analysis techniques to enable accurate measurement of horizontal force and overturning moment. Video data...
Sediment convergence and divergence zones create subaqueous morphological features that range from ripples O (cm) to coastlines O (km). However, there is a gap in knowledge associated with quantifying the contribution of small-scale ripple mobility to the evolution of large-scale morphology. To address this gap, we investigate how small-scale ripples...
The coastal region is home to many types of surface fronts that exist on a submesoscale (1-10 $km$). While in situ observations capture point or transect observations of frontal behavior subsurface, their complex spatial patterns can be well-captured using remote sensing techniques, which provide synoptic views of the ocean surface...
A sewer geyser is a series of ejecting air-water mixture eruptions through vertical shafts of drainage systems. In field observed geyser incidents, manhole covers were blown into the air and they were followed by ejecting air-water mixture eruptions that lasted for several seconds at a time. Trapped air in sewer...
Asymmetric tensor fields are useful for understanding fluid flow and solid deformation. They present new challenges, however, for traditional tensor field visualization techniques such as hyperstreamline placement and glyph packing. This is because the physical behavior of tensors inside real domains where eigenvalues are real is fundamentally different from the...
The design of programming tools is slow and costly. To ease this process, we have developed a design pattern catalog aimed at providing guidance about how to design tools for developers. This guidance is grounded in Information Foraging Theory (IFT), which empirical studies have shown to be useful for understanding...
Machine learning systems are generally trained offline using ground truth data that has been labeled by experts. However, these batch training methods are not a good fit for many applications, especially in the cases where complete ground truth data is not available for offline training. In addition, batch methods do...
Wave breaking in the surf zone is an important forcing
mechanism on the generation of nearshore currents and in the driving
of sediment transport. At the same time, wave breaking can have
significant spatial and temporal variability that needs to be
accounted for in the description of nearshore processes. Remote...
In many traditional computer graphics applications, rendered scenes typically utilize 3D meshes to represent objects within an environment. As the demand to further improve the realism of graphics applications increases, such as for movies and games, it is becoming more important to represent the inner volumes of object meshes. In...
We describe spatio-temporal random processes using linear mixed models and discuss estimation, inference, and prediction under this formulation. We show how many commonly used covariances are special cases of this more general framework and pay special attention to the separable and product-sum covariances. The linear mixed model formulation facilitates straightforward...
Fluid-structure interaction (FSI) is a very interesting and challenging multi-disciplinary field involving interaction of a movable or deformable structure with an internal or surrounding fluid flow. FSI has several practical engineering applications such as the determination of the hydrodynamic forces on a structure or the dynamics of motion of bodies...
This thesis considers the problem in which a teacher is interested in teaching action policies to computer agents for sequential decision making. The vast majority of policy
learning algorithms o er teachers little flexibility in how policies are taught. In particular,
one of two learning modes is typically considered: 1)...
Schistosomiasis, a neglected global pandemic, may be curtailed by blocking transmission of the parasite via its intermediate hosts, aquatic snails. Elucidating the genetic basis of snail-schistosome interaction is a key to this strategy. Here we map a natural parasite-resistance polymorphism from a Caribbean population of the snail Biomphalaria glabrata. In...
Three-dimensional symmetric tensor fields have a wide range of applications in solid and fluid mechanics. Recent advances in the topological analysis of 3D symmetric tensor fields focus on the local behaviors of tensor fields at degenerate points, which usually form curves. In this paper, we make a number of observations...
Research Objective:
Determine if disparities in the allocation of lifesaving organs, specifically the kidney and liver, exist between low and non-low socioeconomic status (SES) groups in the US.
Study Design:
A literature review will be conducted to examine anticipated inequalities between patients of different SES. Potential causes of the disparity...
Background:
New strategies to combat the global scourge of schistosomiasis may be revealed by increased understanding of the mechanisms by which the obligate snail host can resist the schistosome parasite. However, few molecular markers linked to resistance have been identified and characterized in snails.
Methodology/Principal Findings:
Here we test six...
Networks of distributed, remote sensors are providing ecological scientists with a view of our environment that is unprecedented in detail. However, these networks are subject to harsh conditions, which lead to malfunctions in individual sensors and failures in network communications. This behavior manifests as corrupt or missing measurements in the...
BACKGROUND: Long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) are transcripts that are 200 bp or longer, do not encode proteins,
and potentially play important roles in eukaryotic gene regulation. However, the number, characteristics and
expression inheritance pattern of lncRNAs in maize are still largely unknown.
RESULTS: By exploiting available public EST databases, maize...
When people talk about the one-child policy in China, it always relates to topics like human rights violations or the population control dilemma. The one-child policy was published in the 1980s, around the same time as the Economic Reform, and these twin policies brought Chinese society tremendous changes. This paper...