UNLV Symphony Orchestra: Halloween Spooktacular

Program listing performers and works performe

Single Event Effects Testing For Low Earth Orbit Missions with Neutrons

Neutrons can effectively be used to screen electronic parts intended to be used in Low Earth Orbit. This paper compares neutron with proton environments in spacecraft and discusses recent comparison testing

A Comparison of Electron Transport Rate, Photosynthetically Active Radiation, Light-Adapted Fluorescence, and Dark-Adapted Fluorescence Between Stipa pulchra and Pennisetium setaceum

The purpose of this investigation was to provide an explanation into how the invasive species Pennisetium setaceum, Fountain Grass, is able to outcompete the native California grassland species Stipa pulchra, Purple Needle Grass. We used a light adapted and a dark adapted fluorometer to measure the photosynthetic radiation (PAR), leaf temperature, alpha (α), light adapted fluorescence (Fv’/Fm’), dark adapted fluorescence (Fv/Fm), and the electron transport rate (ETR) on young Fountain Grass and Purple Needlegrass. After collecting and analyzing the data, we concluded that the dark adapted fluorescence (Fv/Fm) was the only statistically significant measurement where the Fv/Fm of S. pulchra is higher than that of P. setaceum which suggests that S. pulchra’s quantum yield of photosystem II is higher and is therefore more efficient. With this result, we are able to state that Fv/Fm is not the reason why Fountain Grass outcompetes Purple Needlegrass

Integration and Rebirth through Confrontation: Fight Club and American Beauty as Contemporary Religious Parables

In this article, I discuss the religious significance of two recent American films which raise pertinent questions about the nature and quality of human existence, its anxieties and aspirations, at the turn of the millennium. Both David Fincher's Fight Club and Sam Mendes' American Beauty wrestle with the efficacy of confrontation as a means of attaining redemption from the disconnectedness and estrangement that characterises the lives of the protagonists in each of these pictures. The import that the trajectories of these characters have for the film audience will also be examined, insofar as these films are accredited by some viewers with helping to facilitate a remedy to the malaise and disaffection in their lives that these protagonists exemplify

Delphinid whistle production and call matching during playback of simulated military sonar.

In 2007 and 2008, controlled exposure experiments were performed in the Bahamas to study behavioral responses to simulated mid-frequency active sonar (MFA) by three groups of odontocetes: false killer whales, Pseudorca crassidens; short-finned pilot whales, Globicephala macrorhynchus; and melon-headed whales, Peponocephala electra. An individual in each group was tagged with a Dtag to record acoustic and movement data. During exposures, some individuals produced whistles that seemed similar to the experimental MFA stimulus. Statistical tests were thus applied to investigate whistle-MFA similarity and the relationship between whistle production rate and MFA reception time. For the false killer whale group, overall whistle rate and production rate of the most MFA-like whistles decreased with time since last MFA reception. Despite quite low whistle rates overall by the melon-headed whales, statistical results indicated minor transient silencing after each signal reception. There were no apparent relationships between pilot whale whistle rates and MFA sounds within the exposure period. This variability of responses suggests that changes in whistle production in response to acoustic stimuli depend not only on species and sound source, but also on the social, behavioral, or environmental contexts of exposure

A framework for recalibrating pedotransfer functions using nonlinear least squares and estimating uncertainty using quantile regression

Pedotransfer functions (PTFs) have been developed for many regions to estimate values missing from soil profile databases. However, globally there are many areas without existing PTFs, and it is not advisable to use PTFs outside their domain of development due to poor performance. Further, developed PTFs often lack accompanying uncertainty estimations. To address these issues, a framework is proposed where existing equation-based PTFs are recalibrated using a nonlinear least squares (NLS) approach and validated on two regions of Canada; this process is coupled with the use of quantile regression (QR) to generate uncertainty estimates. Many PTFs have been developed to predict soil bulk density, so this variable is used as a case study to evaluate the outcome of recalibration. New coefficients are generated for existing soil bulk density PTFs, and the performance of these PTFs is validated using three case study datasets, one from the Ottawa region of Ontario and two from the province of British Columbia, Canada. The improvement of the performance of the recalibrated PTFs is evaluated using root mean square error (RMSE) and the concordance correlation coefficient (CCC). Uncertainty estimates produced using QR are communicated through the mean prediction interval (MPI) and prediction interval coverage probability (PICP) graphs. This framework produces dataset-specific PTFs with improved accuracy and minimized uncertainty, and the method can be applied to other regional datasets to improve the estimations of existing PTF model forms. The methods are most successful with large datasets and PTFs with fewer variables and minimal transformations; further, PTFs with organic carbon (OC) as one of or the sole input variable resulted in the highest accuracy