Recently there has been a great interest in the ability to relate the hydro-mechanical properties of soils to their acoustic response. This ability could enhance high resolution non-destructive evaluation of the shallow subsurface, and would have applications in a variety of fields including groundwater and contaminant hydrogeology, oil recovery, soil dynamics, and the detection of buried objects. Groundwater hydrologists and environmental engineers are challenged with the task of characterizing the material, mechanical and hydraulic properties of the subsurface with limited information generally collected from discrete points. Geophysical testing offers a suite of measurement techniques that allow for the non destructive evaluation of potentially large areas in a continuous manner. Acoustic testing is one geophysical method used by many professions to characterize the subsurface. Unsaturated and multiphase flow modeling relies on the relationship between the capillary pressure and the level of saturation of the porous media. It has been previously suggested that this relationship may be non-unique and rate dependent. A theory which relates this dynamic relationship to the acoustic properties of the soil was developed by others. This research attempts to experimentally verify this theory by meeting the following three objectives: (1) develop an apparatus and procedure to collect acoustic waveforms on laboratory sized unsaturated soil samples, (2) develop a forward modeling technique using a one-dimensional wave propagation model as an alternative analysis method for waves collected on relatively small laboratory specimens, and (3) apply the theory to the measured acoustic data in an attempt to predict the dynamic behavior of the capillary pressure relationship. The acoustic data collected showed variation in compressional wave velocity and attenuation with saturation, and the trends were consistent with data collected by others in partially saturated rocks. The forward modeling technique was shown to provide objective results with reasonable accuracy and low computational time. The dynamic effects predicted with these acoustic measurements did not sufficiently explain the dynamic behavior seen in the laboratory. This is attributed to other causes of significant attenuation not accounted for in the wave propagation theory that was evaluated.

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Mobile devices have become a dominant tool in our daily lives. Business and personal usage has escalated tremendously since the emergence of smartphones and tablets. The combination of powerful processing in mobile devices, such as smartphones and the Internet, have established a new era for communications systems. This has put further pressure on the performance and efficiency of telecommunications systems in delivering the aspirations of users. Mobile device users no longer want devices that merely perform phone calls and messaging. Rather, they look for further interactive applications such as video streaming, navigation and real time social interaction. Such applications require a new set of hardware and standards. The WiFi (IEEE 802.11) standard has been at the forefront of reliable and high-speed internet access telecommunications. This is due to its high signal quality (quality of service) and speed (throughput). However, its limited availability and short range highlights the need for further protocols, in particular when far away from access points or base stations. This led to the emergence of 3G followed by 4G and the upcoming 5G standard that, if fully realised, will provide another dimension in “anywhere, anytime internet connectivity.” On the other hand, the WiMAX (IEEE 802.16) standard promises to exceed the WiFi signal coverage range. The coverage range could be extended to kilometres at least with a better or similar WiFi signal level. This thesis considers a dynamically reconfigurable architecture that is capable of processing various modules within telecommunications systems. Forward error correction, coder and navigation modules are deployed in a unified low power communication platform. These modules have been selected since they are among those with the highest demand in terms of processing power, strict processing time or throughput. The modules are mainly realised within WiFi and WiMAX systems in addition to global positioning systems (GPS). The idea behind the selection of these modules is to investigate the possibility of designing an architecture capable of processing various systems and dynamically reconfiguring between them. The GPS system is a power-hungry application and, at the same time, it is not needed all of the time. Hence, one key idea presented in this thesis is to effectively exploit the dynamic reconfiguration capability so as to reconfigure the architecture (GPS) when it is not needed in order to process another needed application or function such as WiFi or WiMAX. This will allow lower energy consumption and the optimum usage of the hardware available on the device. This work investigates the major current coarse-grain reconfigurable architectures. A novel multi-rate convolution encoder is then designed and realised as a reconfigurable fabric. This demonstrates the ability to adapt the algorithms involved to meet various requirements. A throughput of between 200 and 800 Mbps has been achieved for the rates 1/2 to 7/8, which is a great achievement for the proposed novel architecture. A reconfigurable interleaver is designed as a standalone fabric and on a dynamically reconfigurable processor. High throughputs exceeding 90 Mbps are achieved for the various supported block sizes. The Reed Solomon coder is the next challenging system to be designed into a dynamically reconfigurable processor. A novel Galois Field multiplier is designed and integrated into the developed Reed Solomon reconfigurable processor. As a result of this work, throughputs of 200Mbps and 93Mbps respectively for RS encoding and decoding are achieved. A GPS correlation module is also investigated in this work. This is the main part of the GPS receiver responsible for continuously tracking GPS satellites and extracting messages from them. The challenging aspect of this part is its real-time nature and the associated critical time constraints. This work resulted in a novel dynamically reconfigurable multi-channel GPS correlator with up to 72 simultaneous channels. This work is a contribution towards a global unified processing platform that is capable of processing communication-related operations efficiently and dynamically with minimum energy consumption.

Master of Science / Department of Agronomy / Michel D. Ransom / Soil is a dynamic resource that can undergo many changes due to altering conditions (Tugel et al., 2005). With that, humans can have a great effect on the conditions of a landscape and contribute to soil change. As soils change, the function of soils can be altered which would affect the ability of soils to support ecosystem services. The objective of this thesis is to access how management affects dynamic and inherent soil properties in western Kansas soils. Eight sites in Sheridan County, KS mapped as Keith 1-3% slopes (fine-silty, mixed, superactive, mesic Aridic Argiustolls) were described and sampled. Of the eight sites, four are in ST (ST) management and four are in no-till (NT) management. All sites have been irrigated under center pivot irrigation systems since the 1970s. Soil samples of the A horizon were taken at each site to analyze total carbon, aggregate stability, bulk density, pH and microbial respiration to assess the impacts of tillage management on dynamic soil properties. Additionally, pedons were described from the ST sites in the irrigated areas as well as outside the pivot track to represent dryland conditions. Particle size data, field descriptions, and the micromorphology of thin sections were analyzed to determine if the classification of Keith soils are affected by irrigation. Significant differences between NT and ST management were seen in microbial respiration, select water stable aggregate sizes, and pH and bulk density at certain depths. It was also found that irrigation did not affect clay illuviation nor carbonate leaching. Overall, it was concluded that inherent soil properties such as soil map unit composition and parent material can have a greater impact on soil change and prevent the recognition of changes in soil properties over a human time scale.

Clustering applications dealing with perception based or biased data lead to models with non-disjunct clusters. There, objects to be clustered are allowed to belong to several clusters at the same time which results in a fuzzy clustering. It can be shown that this is equivalent to searching all maximal cliques in dynamic graphs like G_t=(V,E_t), where E_(t-1) in E_t, t=1,... ,T; E_0=(). In this article algorithms are provided to track all maximal cliques in a fully dynamic graph. It is naturally to raise the question about the maximum clique, having all maximal cliques. Therefore this article discusses potentials and drawbacks for this problem as well. (author's abstract) / Series: Working Papers on Information Systems, Information Business and Operations

Recently socio-hydrology models have been proposed to analyze the interplay of community risk-coping culture, flooding damage and economic growth. These models descriptively explain the feedbacks between socio-economic development and natural disasters such as floods. Complementary to these descriptive models, we develop a dynamic optimization model, where the inter-temporal decision of an economic agent interacts with the hydrological system. We assume a standard macro-economic growth model where agents derive utility from consumption and output depends on physical capital that can be accumulated through investment. To this framework we add the occurrence of flooding events which will destroy part of the capital. We identify two specific periodic long term solutions and denote them rich and poor economies. Whereas rich economies can afford to invest in flood defense and therefore avoid flood damage and develop high living standards, poor economies prefer consumption instead of investing in flood defense capital and end up facing flood damages every time the water level rises like e.g. the Mekong delta. Nevertheless, they manage to sustain at least a low level of physical capital. We identify optimal investment strategies and compare simulations with more frequent, more intense and stochastic high water level events.

Internet is a source of live data that is constantly updating with data of almost anyfield we can imagine. Having tools that can automatically detect these updates andcan select that information that we are interested in are becoming of utmost importancenowadays. That is the reason why through this thesis we will focus on someeconomic websites, studying their structures and identifying a common type of websitein this field: Dynamic Websites. Even when there are many tools that allow toextract information from the internet, not many tackle these kind of websites. Forthis reason we will study and implement some tools that allow the developers to addressthese pages from a different perspective.

The aim of this work was to use experimental, analytical and computational Computational Fluid Dynamic - CFD methodologies to investigate so-called highly transient axi-symmetric squeeze flows. These flows occur between two co-axial and parallel discs which are subjected to an impact, arising from a falling mass, which induces a constant energy squeezing system, as distinct from the traditionally investigated constant force or constant velocity squeezing systems. Experiments were conducted using a test cell comprising two parallel discs of diameter 120 mm with a flexible bladder used to contain fluid. This test cell was bolted onto the base of a drop-weight tester used to induce constant energy squeeze flows. Glycerine was used as the working fluid, the temperature of which was appropriately monitored. Disc separation, together with pressures at three radial positions, were measured throughout the experimental stroke typically less than 10 ms duration. Two additional pressure transducers at the same radial position as the outermost transducer were also used to monitor and subsequently correct for minor non-axi-symmetries that arose in the system. Approximately 150 tests were conducted, embracing combinations of drop height from 0.1 to 1 m, drop mass from 10 to 55 kg and initial disc separation from 3 to 10 mm. Three elementary features were typically observed: a distinct preliminary pressure spike 1 immediately after impact corresponding to very large accelerations exceeding over 6 km/s2 in some experiments, a secondary major pressure spike 2 towards the termination of the stroke corresponding to diminishing disc separations and a bridging region 3 joining the two spikes corresponding to somewhat reduced pressures. While pressure distributions were observed to be closely parabolic during the major pressure spike, some uncertainty was present during the preliminary pressure spike, ascribed to sensitivities to deviations from axi-symmetry, and the likelihood of inertially generated pressures at the edge of the disc. The former feature appears not to have been reported on in the formal literature. iii Four analytical models were considered, invoking the parallel flow assumption in conjunction with the Navier Stokes equations: an inviscid/inertial model, a viscous model the lubrication approximation, a quasi-steady linear QSL model and a quasi-steady corrected linear QSCL model. The first two of these models, on incorporation of measured disc separations, and the derived velocities and accelerations, achieved acceptable correlations with pressure measurements largely within uncertainty bounds during the initial impact and towards the end of the stroke, respectively. The QSL model agreed satisfactorily with measurements throughout the entire duration of the experiment, while the QSCL model, by incorporating non-linear effects in an approximate linear way, yielded somewhat better correlations. By invoking the parallel flow assumption, all four models predict a parabolic radial pressure distribution. Utilizing a hypothetical case in which variations of disc separation, velocity and acceleration were considered employing similar magnitudes and timescales to those that were measured, outputs of the QSL model yielded results that correlated closely with CFD predictions, while the QSCL data were somewhat better. On the basis of the CFD data it was also inferred that, within practical uncertainty bounds, the parallel flow assumption was valid for the range of disc separation to radius ratios embraced in the current investigation.

The internet has facilitated music metadata production and distribution on an unprecedented scale. A contributing factor of this data deluge is a change in the authorship of this data from the expert few to the untrained crowd. The resulting unordered flood of imperfect annotations provides challenges and opportunities in identifying accurate metadata and linking it to the music audio in order to provide a richer listening experience. We advocate novel adaptations of Dynamic Programming for music metadata synchronisation, ranking and comparison. This thesis introduces Windowed Time Warping, Greedy, Constrained On-Line Time Warping for synchronisation and the Concurrence Factor for automatically ranking metadata. We begin by examining the availability of various music metadata on the web. We then review Dynamic Programming methods for aligning and comparing two source sequences whilst presenting novel, specialised adaptations for efficient, realtime synchronisation of music and metadata that make improvements in speed and accuracy over existing algorithms. The Concurrence Factor, which measures the degree in which an annotation of a song agrees with its peers, is proposed in order to utilise the wisdom of the crowds to establish a ranking system. This attribute uses a combination of the standard Dynamic Programming methods Levenshtein Edit Distance, Dynamic Time Warping, and Longest Common Subsequence to compare annotations. We present a synchronisation application for applying the aforementioned methods as well as a tablature-parsing application for mining and analysing guitar tablatures from the web. We evaluate the Concurrence Factor as a ranking system on a largescale collection of guitar tablatures and lyrics to show a correlation with accuracy that is superior to existing methods currently used in internet search engines, which are based on popularity and human ratings.