Spatial variability in washover deposits : Hurricane Ike and the Texas coast

Washover sand deposits are common depositional features caused by large storms that affect coastal areas. Hurricane Ike was a powerful storm that hit the gulf coast in September of 2008, the track of the eye crossing Bolivar Peninsula in Texas. The attempt was made to exhaustively identify and map washover deposits caused by Hurricane Ike along the Texas coast to the southwest of landfall. Several transitions in the nature of the deposits are identified. The plan view distribution, the volume change, and the relationship with the antecedent topography all present changes that generally mirrors the alongshore decay of Hurricane Ike’s energy, represented by the storm surge and waves. These are put in context using the ratio, called here r, that is the maximum surge height in any given location at the beach divided by the height of the beach berm at the same location. In places where the storm surge was not high enough to overtop the beach berm, waves are assumed to have eroded the beach to the point that it allowed overwash to occur, and quantifying this contribution is a fertile avenue for future research.Geological Science

Efficient Registration of Pathological Images: A Joint PCA/Image-Reconstruction Approach

Registration involving one or more images containing pathologies is challenging, as standard image similarity measures and spatial transforms cannot account for common changes due to pathologies. Low-rank/Sparse (LRS) decomposition removes pathologies prior to registration; however, LRS is memory-demanding and slow, which limits its use on larger data sets. Additionally, LRS blurs normal tissue regions, which may degrade registration performance. This paper proposes an efficient alternative to LRS: (1) normal tissue appearance is captured by principal component analysis (PCA) and (2) blurring is avoided by an integrated model for pathology removal and image reconstruction. Results on synthetic and BRATS 2015 data demonstrate its utility.Comment: Accepted as a conference paper for ISBI 201

Poshlost’ in Nabokov’s Dar through the Prism of Lotman’s Literary Semiotics

The word poshlost’ denotes the concepts of banality, vulgarity or phlistinism, and has been an intellectual and cultural obsession since the second half of the nineteenth century, lasting well into the twentieth century. Russian author Vladimir Nabokov attempted to familiarize English-speaking readers with the notion of poshlost’ in his book Nikolai Gogol (1944); it is hard to find any English-language exposition of the term that does not cite Nabokov’s vigorous elaboration of it. Moreover, it is arguably a convention in scholarship to acknowledge the relationship between poshlost’ and Nabokov’s uncompromising moral and aesthetic values. Poshlost’ has often been discussed as a theme in Nabokov’s fiction, and its bearing on Nabokov’s role as a cultural critic has often been assessed, but there are few studies that examine how the concept influences the overall composition and interpretation of his fiction. This thesis examines how poshlost’ functions as a literary device in Nabokov’s final Russian-language novel Dar (1938), which tells the story of an émigré Russian writer living in Berlin in the 1920s. I look at poshlost’ from the perspective of the theories of aesthetic innovation advanced by semiotician and cultural theorist Iurii Lotman, and within this framework I link poshlost’ with the formation and re-formation of the protagonist’s, as well as the author’s, consciousness. I consider it a relational construct rather than simply an immanent feature of the text, as it would be considered in Russian Formalist approaches. Among the topics I focus on are individuation, self-modelling and autocommunication as facets of the process of personal and creative maturation. I argue that poshlost’ serves as a means of modelling Nabokov’s aesthetics as a textual feature and is a multisignifying and a multifaceted device whose overall artistic effect depends on the conditions under which it is employed

Interjurisdictional Competition and Urban Area Fragmentation

The collective action problem in political science examines the circumstances under which groups can be successfully formed and maintained. While earlier generations of political scientists believed that groups developed in democracies because of the nature of democratic culture and procedures, Mancur Olson (The Logic of Collective Action, 1965) demonstrated that free-riding doomed many attempts at collective action unless selective benefits were granted to members--hence automobile association members receive free travel services, for example. Subsequent theories posited other reasons for successful collective action, such as communication, leadership and anticipated returns from joining. Tests of these hypotheses have taken place primarily in laboratory experiments. This study conducts a real-world natural experiment, examining interjurisdictional competition (IJC)--a government's offer of incentives for businesses to locate within its environs as opposed to the territories of others--in the setting of urbanized areas of various degrees of fragmentation (political organization as one, several or many local governments). If the free-rider hypothesis is true, IJC would increase with higher fragmentation. As the "free-rider" title suggests, IJC has been portrayed in game theory as a prisoners' dilemma. However, more detailed analysis in this study reveals several possible games, each posing a related collective action problem. Methodologically, additive indices from a nationwide survey of economic development practices measure the intensity of IJC effort. Urban area fragmentation is represented by indices using the Hirschman-Herfindahl Index method. The major hypothesis--IJC is a function of fragmentation--is analyzed using OLS regression. The regressions refute the free-rider hypothesis. The statistical analysis then examines the subsequent explanations of collective action. Anticipated returns cannot be substantiated; however, civil society-based indicators show communication and leadership to be causes of successful collective action. Finally, a case study of Hampton Roads (the Virginia Beach-Norfolk-Newport News, Virginia metropolitan area) provides a historical narrative of the efficacy of communication and leadership in successful collective action as well as a possible example of game transition from the prisoners' dilemma to an assurance game

Evaluation of atlas based mouse brain segmentation

Magentic Reasonance Imaging for mouse phenotype study is one of the important tools to understand human diseases. In this paper, we present a fully automatic pipeline for the process of morphometric mouse brain analysis. The method is based on atlas-based tissue and regional segmentation, which was originally developed for the human brain. To evaluate our method, we conduct a qualitative and quantitative validation study as well as compare of b-spline and fluid registration methods as components in the pipeline. The validation study includes visual inspection, shape and volumetric measurements and stability of the registration methods against various parameter settings in the processing pipeline. The result shows both fluid and b-spline registration methods work well in murine settings, but the fluid registration is more stable. Additionally, we evaluated our segmentation methods by comparing volume differences between Fmr1 FXS in FVB background vs C57BL/6J mouse strains