Invertebrates are an important food source for grouse chicks, especially within the first 2 weeks of life. Invertebrate abundance is highly patchy and dependent upon herbaceous cover and vegetation structure. We examined the relationship between invertebrate biomass (from sweepnet samples) and habitat structure at lesser prairie-chicken (Tympanuchus pallidicinctus) brood-use and...
This paper discusses the design, construction, and use of a prototype expert system shell, EXE. EXE is non-conventional in that it does not provide a traditional forward or backward chaining inference mechanism. Instead, it allows the domain expert to control the logic flow of the system in a dynamic fashion....
This project discuses the design of a novel apparatus for measuring the interfacial rheological properties of a complex interface while measuring the concentration of redox species within the sub-phase. Preliminary measurements made using the apparatus are also presented. The objective of the preliminary experimentation was to simultaneously measure the interfacial...
This paper reviews McCabe's cyclomatic complexity and Halstead's laws; it discusses studies in current literature relating the metrics to software. The studies are reproduced using data obtained from a large software project developed in a major electronics firm. Problems that occur when deriving the metrics are discussed; the result of...
Air traffic flow management over the U.S. airpsace is a difficult problem. Current management approaches lead to hundreds of thousands of hours of delay, costing billions of dollars annually. Weather and airport conditions may instigate this delay, but routing decisions balancing delay with congestion contribute significantly to the propagation of...
Seed vigor tests have been developed to evaluate the relative ability of seed lots to produce stands of seedlings in the field. Some workers have suggested the possibility of differentiating vigor levels by germinating seeds under osmotic stress, but have not conducted field trials to evaluate the usefulness of the...
Population genetic techniques are now preeminent in differentiating wild populations. Natural resource managers rely on them in their efforts to restore viable populations of fish and wildlife. Overfishing adversely impacted Yelloweye Rockfish (Sebastes ruberrimus) on the U.S. West Coast in the late 20th century. Management actions included shutting down the...
The problem of analyzing the general linear, time-varying
system is investigated. The approach starts with four different
system representations: the differential equation, transform representations,
signal flow graphs, or block diagrams. Given one of
these system describing representations, it is shown what the
engineer can find out about the system and...
State-of-the-art personal robots need to perform complex manipulation tasks to be viable in complex scenarios. However, many of these robots, like the PR2, use manipulators with high degrees of freedom. High degrees of freedom are desirable from a functionality standpoint, but make the learning task more difficult by adding a...