Convective activity occurs more commonly and frequently across the United States during the spring and summer (nominally, the period of May through September). While distribution of the activity has been examined both temporally (time of maximum activity and severity) and spatially (e.g., nationally as well as regional variations) to depict its characteristic time of occurrence and pattern, ver...

In European Robins, Erithacus rubecula, the magnetic compass is lateralized in favor of the right eye/left hemisphere of the brain. This lateralization develops during the first winter and initially shows a great plasticity. During the first spring migration, it can be temporarily removed by covering the right eye. In the present paper, we used the migratory orientation of robins to analyze the...

Title of Document: THE HYDROLOGIC AND WATER QUALITY PERFORMANCE OF THE SLIGO-DENNIS BIORETENTION CELL. Jennifer M. Olszewski, Master of Science, 2010 Directed By: Professor Allen P. Davis Civil and Environmental Engineering Bioretention cells have been found to improve the hydrologic and water quality performance of impervious areas such as parking lots. The current study recorded hydrologic da...

Neutral genetic markers are routinely used to define distinct units within species that warrant discrete management. Human-induced changes to gene flow however may reduce the power of such an approach. We tested the efficiency of adaptive versus neutral genetic markers in differentiating temporally divergent migratory runs of Chinook salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha) amid high gene flow owing t...

In China, 9Ð5% of the landmass is karst terrain and of that 47,000 km2 is located in semiarid regions. In these regions the karst aquifers feed many large karst springs within basins of thousands of square kilometres. Spring discharges reflect the fluctuation of ground water level and variability of ground water storage in the basins. However, karst aquifers are highly heterogeneous and monitor...

This article presents a summary of past and current artificial intelligence research within the Computer Science Department at East Texas State University (ETSU). The Computer Science Department at ETSU offers a master of science degree with an emphasis in artificial intelligence. AI research, both past and present, has been funded by a grant from E-Systems, Greenville Division AI research proj...

Commercially available prosthetic hands are simple grippers with one or two degrees of freedom; these pinch type devices have two rigid fingers in opposition to a rigid thumb. This paper focuses on an innovative approach for the design of a myoelectric prosthetic hand. The new prosthesis features underactuated mechanisms in order to achieve a natural grasping behavior and a good distribution of...

Mass-spring systems simulations rely on the numerical integration method used for solving the resulting ordinary differential equations. Implicit schemes, which solve such equations, are unconditionally stable and are thus widely used. Part of this stability is due to force filtering which is inherent to the implicit formulation and is referred to artificial damping. We extract this artificial ...