This paper presents an assessment of the vulnerability of the power grid to blackout using graph topological indexes. Based on a FERC 715 report and the outage reports, the cascading faults of summer WSCC 1996 are reconstructed, and the graphical property of the grid is compared between two cases: when the blackout triggering lines are removed simulating the actual sequence of cascading outages...

Object-relational databases add to the relational model the possibility of working with new and complex data and applications. One widely accepted mechanism for assuring the quality of an object-relational database is the use of metrics and it is important to formalize the metrics for having a better understanding of their definitions. Metrics formalization assures the reliable repetition of th...

Six farms using different types of dried manure solid (DMS) strategies, including a farm that had side-by-side pens using sand and DMS, participated in a study to assess the impact on herd health of using DMS as bedding on dairy farms in the Northeast. Samples of unused and used bedding were taken over the course of a year and analyzed for bacterial content and physical properties. Mastitis and...

The Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) hydrological/water quality model divides a watershed into hydrological response units (HRUs) based on unique land cover, soil type, and slope. HRUs are a set of discontinuous land masses that are spatially located in the watershed but their responses are not tied to any particular field. Field_SWAT, a simple graphical user interface (GUI)-driven tool, w...

a State Key Laboratory of Remote Sensing Science, and School of Geography, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China b Beijing Key Laboratory of Environmental Remote Sensing and Digital City, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China c Department of Earth System Science and Policy, University of North Dakota, Clifford Hall, 4149 University Avenue, Grand Forks, ND 58202, USA d Scho...

In today's lecture, we will present a randomized algorithm that embeds any arbitrary metric into a dominating tree metric such that each edge is distorted, in expectation, in the worst case by a factor of O(log n) and such that each edge is not contracted. Recall that a metric on graph G = (V, E) is a function d : E → R. One can define a metric M = (X, d) on an arbitrary set of vertices X with ...