History has shown that local, state, and federal governments are not well-equipped with the flexible and responsive abilities necessary to manage the short supply chain life-cycle inherent in providing appropriate disaster relief resources in a timely fashion. Unfortunately, in these unique situations these inefficiencies can cause considerable harm to the citizenry, the financial economy, and ...

When hungry, the wandering spider Cupiennius salei is frequently seen to catch flying insect prey. The success of its remarkable prey-capture jump from its sitting plant into the air obviously depends on proper timing and sensory guidance. In this study, it is shown that particular features of the airflow generated by the insect suffice to guide the spider. Vision and the reception of substrate...

—Because of their high dispersal abilities, birds are expected to manifest marked genetic structuring only at relatively large geographic scales. However, it is not well known how factors like nest site fidelity in a largely resident species could limit gene flow and increase genetic structuring in birds. In this study we use RAPD markers to estimate genetic structuring in a strongly sedentary ...

This position paper considers the varying applications within intelligent virtual worlds for which the illusion of intelligence should be maintained without introducing expectations beyond the systems abilities. A set of applications is identified where control should be passed from autonomous avatars to a human control operator in some interaction intensive situations in order to provide suffi...

iii This dissertation is dedicated to two fantastic women:-my mother, for teaching me the value of education, and her endless support and encouragement and-my wife, for her tolerance and patience with such an imperfect husband, and her dedication to me and our children I dearly love you both! iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First, I would like to thank my advisor, Dr. A. Bruno Frazier, who has been the mos...

In this sequel to [L-Y1], [L-L-S-Y], and [L-Y2] (respectively arXiv:0709.1515 [math.AG], arXiv:0809.2121 [math.AG], and arXiv:0901.0342 [math.AG]), we study a D-brane probe on a conifold from the viewpoint of the Azumaya structure on D-branes and toric geometry. The details of how deformations and resolutions of the standard toric conifold Y can be obtained via morphisms from Azumaya points are...

ecosystem of arid and semiarid regions of the world, much of the country lies in the sensitive and fragile environment canvases are that factors in the extinction and destruction are easily destroyed in this paper, artificial neural networks (anns) are introduced to obtain improved regional low-flow estimates at ungauged sites. a multilayer perceptron (mlp) network is used to identify the funct...

Forced oscillations in sessile droplets can be exploited in electrowetting mixing of fluid fractions. The necessary complex flows and large shape deformations require a numerical investigation of fluid dynamics in the transient regime. We provide a means to characterize oscillations qualitatively and quantitatively with the goal to examine and to classify flow patterns occurring inside. A super...