Water quality data collection in shallow water areas can be a challenging task. Obstacles encountered in such environments include difficulty in covering large territories and the presence of inaccessible areas due to a variety of reasons such as a soft bottom or contamination. There is also a high probability of disturbing the test area while placing the sensors. This paper describes a NASA-fu...

Unexpected events — ranging from extreme weather to product contamination — can easily disrupt businesses in today's complex, interconnected global economy. The good news? A company can substantially increase its resilience by improving its ability to detect — and respond to — disruptions quickly.

Atrazine has been identified in at least 20 of the 1,636 hazardous waste sites that have been proposed for inclusion on the EPA National Priorities List (NPL) (HazDat 2003). However, the number of sites evaluated for atrazine is not known. The frequency for these sites within the United States can be seen in Figure 6-1. Of these sites, all 20 are located within the United States and none are lo...

We investigate the performance of robust estimates of multivariate location under nonstandard data contamination models such as componentwise outliers (i.e., contamination in each variable is independent from the other variables). This model brings up a possible new source of statistical error that we call “propagation of outliers.” This source of error is unusual in the sense that it is genera...

Development of applicable robustness results for stochastic programs with probabilistic constraints is a demanding task. In this paper we follow the relatively simple ideas of output analysis based on the contamination technique and focus on construction of computable global bounds for the optimal value function. Dependence of the set of feasible solutions on the probability distribution rules ...

A method is described for direct analysis of lead in blood utilizing the carbon rod atomizer. Aliquots of whole blood are analyzed without pre-treatment. Resuits are comparable to those for a similar non-flame technique in which whole blood samples were prediluted with “Triton X-100.” The small sample volumes required and the minimal sample preparation further diminish the possibility of spurio...