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...
Internal stability of Geosynthetic-Reinforced Soil (GRS) walls are conventionally assessed using lateral earth pressure methods. Determination of these pressures is a key component of limit state design as it enables determination of mobilized resisting forces in reinforcements needed to ensure stability and function of the GRS structure. However, conventional methods...
Relational binary operators, such as join, are arguably the most costly and frequently used operations in relational data systems. In many join algorithms, the majority of the process time is spent on scanning and attempting to join the parts of the relations that do not satisfy the join condition and...
Emerging infectious diseases impact both human and wildlife populations. Infectious agents, in particular the aquatic fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (chytrid), have an influential role in driving global amphibian population declines. The emergence of the chytrid fungus has aspects of both geographic spread as well as climate shifts altering environmental conditions and...
The first edition of the Highway Safety Manual (HSM) provides a quantitative
approach to predict the safety of transportation facilities based on the recently
developed scientific methods. This approach, known as the predictive method, was
developed for several states in the United States. Due to differences in driver
population, weather...
Easy-first, a search-based structured prediction approach, has been applied to many NLP tasks including dependency parsing and coreference resolution. This approach employs a learned greedy policy (action scoring function) to make easy decisions first, which constrains the remaining decisions and makes them easier. This thesis studies the problem of learning...
Six filtrate samples (liquid state) were obtained from selected stages in a totally-chlorine- free (TCF) bleach pulp mill. The solids were recovered by evaporation on rotary evaporators and by lyophilization with a freeze drier. Chemical contents (inorganic and organic chemicals) of the six filtrates were analyzed quantitatively according to TAPPI...
The pentacyclic tritcrpene 17β(H), 21β(H)-hop-22(29)-ene (diploptence) occurs in sediments throughout the Columbia River drainage basin and off the southern coast of Washington state in concentrations comparable to long-chain plantwax n-alkanes. The same relationship is evident for diploptene and long-chain n-alkanes in soils from the Willamette Valley. Microorganisms indigenous to soils...
Recently, several studies have investigated price behaviors of aquaculture and wild fisheries products and related the differences in price fluctuations to production technology, and environmental shocks. Researchers have also documented the evidence of asymmetric price responses along the supply chain of seafood products; however, a feature that has received little...