Nan Wan is a half-closed embayment in the most southern part of Taiwan. While facing the Luzon Strait, it also connects to the Pacific Ocean in its southeast, and is adjacent the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea . In view of general oceanic circulation, Nan Wan Bay happens to lie to the rim of South China Sea circumfluence and Kuroshio where a variety of water mass exchange has taken place, causing saline intrusion and mixed of water. Seasonal variation and tidal fluctuations also contribute to the exchange of water masses. The Third Nuclear Power Station of Taiwan Power Company is located in Nan Wan with its thermal discharge outlet adjacent to Maobitou to the west of the bay in order to minimize the effect of warm water discharge on the local marine ecology and coral . A long-term monitoring program on water temperature and other environmental factors has been set up implemented .this research report will first describe the archives regarding the hydrology in Nan Wan in support of monitoring the process in temperature variation . Previous research efforts are found somehow unable reveal precisely the physical mechanism leading to water temperature variations in the bay, due to limited facilities, short of information or poor analytical tools. This report adopts 14 records of water temperature at the thermal outlet of the Third Nuclear Power Station for signal analysis. As to non-linear and unstable data analysis, it is based on the Hilbert-Huang Transform. HHT includes Empirical Mode Decomposition, EMD which could decompose the raw data into numerous Intrinsic Mode Function, IMF. It is allowed to comprehend the main causes for the rising and dropping of water temperature based on the variation of spectroscopy by transferring through Hilbert and analyzing via IMF. Furthermore, the characteristic of each quantity could be developed according to the quantities acquired from the former method of HHT. The analytical report of water temperature covers 14 records dating from 1999 to 2003. In light of the analytical report, tide and wind account for the main cause of the temperature variation in waters while demanding information to ensure whether it is influenced by other factors like internal waves, water masses or landforms, etc. In addition, the report compares the difference in the same of data between FFT and HHT and moreover concludes the advantages and disadvantages as reference for researches.

Many interacting complex systems in biology, in physics, in technology and social systems, can be represented in a form of large networks. These large networks are mathematically represented by graphs. A graph is represented usually by the adjacency or the Laplacian matrix. Important features of the underlying structure and dynamics of them can be extracted from the analysis of the spectrum of the graphs. Spectral analysis of the so called normalized Laplacian of large networks became popular in the recent years. The Laplacian matrices of the empirical networks are in form of unstructured large sparse matrices. The aim of this thesis is the comparison of different eigenvalue solvers for large sparse symmetric matrices which arise from the graph theoretical epresentation of undirected networks. The spectrum of the normalized Laplacian is in the interval [0 2] and the multiplicity of the eigenvalue 1 plays a particularly important role for the network analysis. Moreover, the spectral analysis of protein-protein interaction networks has revealed that these networks have a different distribution type than other model networks such as scale free networks. In this respect, the eigenvalue solvers implementing the well-known implicitly restarted Arnoldi method, Lanczos method, Krylov-Schur and Jacobi Davidson methods are investigated. They exist as MATLAB routines and are included in some freely available packages. The performances of different eigenvalue solvers PEIG, AHBEIGS, IRBLEIGS, EIGIFP, LANEIG, JDQR, JDCG in MATLAB and the library SLEPc in C++ were tested for matrices of size between 100-13000 and are compared in terms of accuracy and computing time. The accuracy of the eigenvalue solvers are validated for the Paley graphs with known eigenvalues and are compared for large empirical networks using the residual plots and spectral density plots are computed.

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Ocean Ambient Noise covers wide range except target signal in the sonar equation and is an influential parameter in sonar performance. Empirical equation obtained from linear regression of wind speed and ambient noise data is a common method to predict the noise level. Both ambient noise and wind speed data collected from experiments in southwest and northeast Taiwan sea were analyzed in statistics and time series. Experiment data was also used for prediction equations and further analysis. Coefficient of determination (r2) and F-test for the slope of the regression line were used to estimate how noise fit with wind speed data and the credibility of the regression. The result of the analysis was that the distribution of r2 changes with regions. The values of r2 calculated from northeast experiment data are higher than southwest because of the high percentage of high wind speed. The data from the northeast experiment is considered more appropriate for the prediction of noise level because the higher value of r2. All results of F-test showed the correlation between wind speed are statistically significant except the winter data in the southwest experiment. By using these two indicators, the credibility of the prediction equation can be realized and the prediction performance of sonar is promoted.

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Achieving a high degree of efficiency is non-trivial when managing the performance of large web-facing applications such as e-commerce websites and social networks. While computing clouds have been touted as a good solution for elastic applications, many significant technological challenges still have to be addressed in order to leverage the full potential of this new computing paradigm. In this dissertation I argue that the automation of elastic n-tier application performance management in computing clouds presents novel challenges to classical system performance management methodology that can be successfully addressed through a systematic empirical approach. I present strong evidence in support of my thesis in a framework of three incremental building blocks: Experimental Analysis of Elastic System Scalability and Consolidation, Modeling and Detection of Non-trivial Performance Phenomena in Elastic Systems, and Automated Control and Configuration Planning of Elastic Systems. More concretely, I first provide a proof of concept for the feasibility of large-scale experimental database system performance analyses, and illustrate several complex performance phenomena based on the gathered scalability and consolidation data. Second, I extend these initial results to a proof of concept for automating bottleneck detection based on statistical analysis and an abstract definition of multi-bottlenecks. Third, I build a performance control system that manages elastic n-tier applications efficiently with respect to complex performance phenomena such as multi-bottlenecks. This control system provides a proof of concept for automated online performance management based on empirical data.

Includes vita. / Title from PDF of title page. / Document formatted into pages; contains 134 pages. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of South Florida, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references. / Text (Electronic thesis) in PDF format. / ABSTRACT: Validity generalization work over the past 25 years has called into question the veracity of the assumption that validity is situationally specific. Recent theoretical and methodological work has suggested that validity coefficients may be transportable even if true validity is not a constant. Most transportability work is based on the assumption that the distribution of rho ( ) is normal, yet, no empirical evidence exists to support this assumption. The present study used a competing model approach in which a new procedure for assessing transportability was compared with two more commonly used methods. Empirical Bayes estimation (Brannick, 2001; Brannick & Hall, 2003) was evaluated alongside both the Schmidt-Hunter multiplicative model (Hunter & Schmidt, 1990) and a corrected Hedges-Vevea (see Hall & Brannick, 2002; Hedges & Vevea, 1998) model. The purpose of the present study was two-fold. The first part of the study compared the accuracy of estimates of the mean, standard deviation, and the lower bound of 90 and 99 percent credibility intervals computed from the three different methods across 32 simulated conditions. The mean, variance, and shape of the distribution varied across the simulated conditions. The second part of the study involved comparing results of analyses of the three methods based on previously published validity coefficients. The second part of the study was used to show whether choice of method for determining whether transportability is warranted matters in practice. Results of the simulation analyses suggest that the Schmidt-Hunter method is superior to the other methods even when the distribution of true validity parameters violates the assumption of normality. Results of analyses conducted on real data show trends consistent with those evident in the analyses of the simulated data. Conclusions regarding transportability, however, did not change as a function of method used for any of the real data sets. Limitations of the present study as well as recommendations for practice and future research are provided. / System requirements: World Wide Web browser and PDF reader. / Mode of access: World Wide Web.

Various methods have been used, including airborne radars, LIDAR, observation of flying birds, towers, tethered balloons, and aircraft to gain both a qualitative and quantitative representation of how heat and moisture are transported to higher altitudes and grow the boundary or mixing layer by thermal updrafts. This paper builds upon that research using an instrumented glider to determine the structure and build a mathematical model of thermals in a desert environment. During these flights, it was discovered that the traditional view of a thermal as a singular rising plume of air did not sufficiently explain what was being observed, but rather another phenomenon was occurring. This paper puts forth the argument and a mathematical model to show that thermals actually take the form of a hexagonal convection cell at higher levels in the convective boundary layer when the thermal acts as if unrestrained by borders as in non-linear cases of free convection.

The heavily developed Long Key is located in Pinellas County in west-central Florida. The structured Blind Pass at the north end of the barrier island interrupts the southward longshore sediment transport, resulting in severe and chronic beach erosion along the northern portion of the island. Frequent beach nourishments were conducted to mitigate the erosion. In this study, the performance of the most recent beach nourishment in 2010 is quantified through time-series beach profile surveys. Over the 34-month period, the nourished northern portion of the island, Upham Beach, lost up to 330 m3/m of sand, with a landward shoreline retreat of up to 100 m. The middle portion of the island gained up to 25 m3/m of sand, benefiting from the sand lost from Upham Beach. The southern portion of Long Key lost a modest amount of sediment, largely due to Tropical Storm Debby, which approached from the south in June 2012. The severe erosion along Upham Beach is induced by a large negative longshore transport gradient. The beach here has no sand bar and retreated landward persistently over the 34-month study period. In contrast the profiles in the central section of the island generally have a sand bar which moved landward and seaward in response to seasonal and storm-induced wave-energy changes. The sand volume across the entire profile in the central portion of the island is mostly conserved. Two typical example beach profiles, LK3A and R157, were selected to examine the ability of the commonly used principal component analysis (PCA), also commonly known as empirical orthogonal function analysis (EOF), to identify beach profile ix changes induced by longshore and cross-shore sediment transport gradients. For the longshore-transport driven changes at the non-barred profile LK3A, the principal eigenvector accounted for over 91% of the total variance, with a dominant broad peak in the cross-shore distribution. At the barred R157, the profile changes were caused mainly by cross-shore transport gradients with modest contribution from longshore transport gradient; eigenvalue one only accounted for less than 51% of the total variance, and eigenvalues two and three still contributed considerably to the overall variance. In order to verify the uniqueness of the PCA results from LK3A and R157, five numerical experiments were conducted, simulating changes at a barred and non-barred beach driven by longshore, cross-shore, and combined sediment transport gradients. Results from LK3A and R157 compare well with simulated beach erosion (or accretion) due to variable longshore sediment transport gradients and due to both cross-shore and longshore sediment transport gradients, respectively. Different PCA results were obtained from different profile change patterns.

A high resolution speedy delivery time domain reflectometer (SD/TDR) has been developed in the Electrical Engineering department at The University of Texas at Austin. The SD/TDR uses a novel non-sinusoidal signal that does not undergo dispersion during transmission in a lossy media. SD/TDR is used to estimate the length and detect the location of faults in the transmission lines. Time of flight (TOF) is one of the critical parameters of SD/TDR and a function of several temperature dependent factors. Given the TOF and length of a transmission line, signal delay can be computed. This research presents an empirical study of the effect of temperature on the TOF in a plenum grade coaxial cable for temperatures ranging from -3 °C to 60 °C. We also study the effect of temperature on characteristic impedance of the coaxial cable. Finally, a SD double exponential waveform is used to estimate TOF for calibrated short and open terminations. / text