Study Guide Mathematical Modeling for Decision Making II DA 3410

The mission of the U.S. Army Special Operations Command is to organize, train, educate, man, equip, fund, administer, mobilize, deploy and sustain Army special operations forces to successfully conduct worldwide special operations, across the range of military operations, in support of regional combatant commanders, American ambassadors and other agencies as directed

Excel Study Guide & Help/User Manual for DA 3410 Students

We used Excel to do some basic data analysis tasks to see whether it is a reasonable alternative to using a statistical package for the same tasks. We concluded that Excel is a poor choice for statistical analysis beyond textbook examples, the simplest descriptive statistics, or for more than a very few columns. The problems we encountered that led to this conclusion are in four general areas: • Missing values are handled inconsistently, and sometimes incorrectly. • Data organization differs according to analysis, forcing you to reorganize your data in many ways if you want to do many different analyses. • Many analyses can only be done on one column at a time, making it inconvenient to do the same analysis on many columns at the same time. • Output is poorly organized, sometimes inadequately labeled, and there is no record of how an analysis was accomplished. Excel is convenient for data entry, and for quickly manipulating rows and columns prior to statistical analysis. However when you are ready to do the statistical analysis, we recommend the use of a statistical package such as SAS, SPSS, Stata, Systat or Minitab

ADVANCING FROM THE MODERN QUEST FOR MIRACLES TO A POST MODERN SCIENCE OF THE MIRACULOUS

The mechanical model of the Universe that so dominated the modern era effectively banished the deep wondrous and miraculous to a distant realm outside daily existence and experience of psyche and creation. Modern religion responded by defining miracles as essentially "divine interventions contradicting nature's laws." Bur what if existence itself is miraculous and wondrous and our capacity for awe, reverence, gratitude and "isness" itself were the true meaning of the miraculous? Is this not what the mystics teach and what post-modern science is destined (0 teach us as well?Approached with an appropriate sense of wonder, we can see the depth of the miraculous within nature and within human nature in particular. Modern science removed the fantasy that we and our earth occupy the physical center of the universe, but post-modern science has demonstrated that we do live right in the middle of the scale of things, and we have the creative powers (0 discover our place in the scheme of things. Reawakening awareness of the sacredness of being, the sacredness of existence, enlivens our sciences to recognize the light of the multitude of divine sparks. Awakening wonder empowers compassion, and sparks our creativity (0 heal the damage we have done by believing we were masters of the world, when we are actually embedded in the web of creation.We will explore these and other questions about the miraculous within nature In general and within human nature in particular

CITIDEL Collection Building

The aim of this study is to facilitate the goals of the Computing and Information Technology Interactive Digital Educational Library (CITIDEL) by increasing the number of collections available to it. This study will help in achieving this goal by focusing on four diverse collections

Charting the Microbiome Biodiversity of the Appalachian Highlands Region: A Novel Study

The rapid expansion of medical discoveries has been met with growing number of deaths from nosocomial multidrug-resistant bacteria. The dramatic rise of these antibiotic-resistant microorganisms has been placed on the World Health Organization’s watchlist as one of the biggest threats to the future of healthcare. There continues to be a shortage of effective antibiotics with the rise of these “superbugs”. With the growing number of deadly pathogens, the future of medicine relies on scientific findings of novel compounds to combat multidrug-resistant bacteria. The Appalachian Highlands Region holds the potential for discovering these new compounds. As the most biodiverse temperate forest region in North America, the Smoky Mountains contains a plethora of microorganisms that have become genetically diversified over millions of years. In order to compete with one another, many of these soil bacteria naturally produce their own antibiotics. With the wide variation of natural bacteria, Appalachia serves as a testing ground to harness the power of natural antibiotics and understand how these compounds can aide in clinic use. A gram of soil contains more than 10,000 different species of bacteria. The biodiversity of these microbes is still largely unknown, as almost 99% of these species cannot be cultured in a normal lab setting. Utilizing the 16S genomic region of microbes, this pilot project will lay the foundations of discovering Appalachia’s microbiome, which has, thus far, never been cataloged

Why pair? Evidence of aggregative mating in a socially monogamous marine fish (Siganus doliatus, Siganidae)

© 2015 The Authors. Many species live in stable pairs, usually to breed and raise offspring together, but this cannot be assumed. Establishing whether pairing is based on mating, or an alternative cooperative advantage, can be difficult, especially where species show no obvious sexual dimorphism and where the act of reproduction itself is difficult to observe. In the tropical marine fishes known as rabbitfish (Siganidae), half of extant species live in socially monogamous, territorial pairs. It has been assumed that partnerships are for mating, but the reproductive mode of pairing rabbitfish is currently unconfirmed. Using passive acoustic telemetry to track movements of fishes belonging to one such species (Siganus doliatus), we provide the first evidence that paired adult fish undertake highly synchronized migrations with multiple conspecifics on a monthly cycle. All tagged individuals migrated along the same route in three consecutive months and were absent from home territories for 2–3 days just after the new moon. The timing and directionality of migrations suggest that S. doliatus may form spawning aggregations, offering the potential for exposure to multiple reproductive partners. The finding raises fundamental questions about the basis of pairing, mate choice and partnership longevity in this family

Sediments and herbivory as sensitive indicators of coral reef degradation

© 2016 by the author(s). Around the world, the decreasing health of coral reef ecosystems has highlighted the need to better understand the processes of reef degradation. The development of more sensitive tools, which complement traditional methods of monitoring coral reefs, may reveal earlier signs of degradation and provide an opportunity for pre-emptive responses. We identify new, sensitive metrics of ecosystem processes and benthic composition that allow us to quantify subtle, yet destabilizing, changes in the ecosystem state of an inshore coral reef on the Great Barrier Reef. Following severe climatic disturbances over the period 2011-2012, the herbivorous reef fish community of the reef did not change in terms of biomass or functional groups present. However, fish-based ecosystem processes showed marked changes, with grazing by herbivorous fishes declining by over 90%. On the benthos, algal turf lengths in the epilithic algal matrix increased more than 50% while benthic sediment loads increased 37-fold. The profound changes in processes, despite no visible change in ecosystem state, i.e., no shift to macroalgal dominance, suggest that although the reef has not undergone a visible regime-shift, the ecosystem is highly unstable, and may sit on an ecological knife-edge. Sensitive, process-based metrics of ecosystem state, such as grazing or browsing rates thus appear to be effective in detecting subtle signs of degradation and may be critical in identifying ecosystems at risk for the future

Talking On Your Cell Phone and Ethical Responsibility: How Many Children Died for Your Battery?

Ethics has been an increasingly important topic in business and many issues stem from this broad subject.Especially when companies cross borders to conduct business, the lines for what is ethical begin to blur whencosts and profits are concerned. Thus, many issues emerge when looking at environmental and socialresponsibility, such as environmental friendliness, local manufacturing, and child labor. These ethical issues havebrought about standards of conduct for businesses as consumers tend to react poorly when an ethical line hasbeen crossed. This study attempts to look at how one such issue, child labor, impacts the purchasing behaviorsof consumers for the cell phone industry. Coltan is a raw mineral that is used in many technologies, including thebatteries of cell phones and computers. This mineral is currently being mined using child labor in Africa,specifically the country of Congo. Unfortunately, this issue has not been publicized and cell phone companies arenot currently being held accountable for where the coltan for their cell phones is coming from. Thus, the purposeof this study is to expose this ethical dilemma and measure the potential effect on consumers within the cellphone industry

SimFusion: A Unified Similarity Measurement Algorithm for Multi-Type Interrelated Web Objects

In this paper, we use a Unified Relationship Matrix (URM) to represent a set of heterogeneous web objects (e.g., web pages, queries) and their interrelationships (e.g., hyperlink, user click-through relationships). We claim that iterative computations over the URM can help overcome the data sparseness problem (a common situation in the Web) and detect latent relationships among heterogeneous web objects, thus, can improve the quality of various information applications that require the combination of information from heterogeneous sources. To support our claim, we further propose a unified similarity-calculating algorithm, the SimFusion algorithm. By iteratively computing over the URM, the SimFusion algorithm can effectively integrate relationships from heterogeneous sources when measuring the similarity of two web objects. Experiments based on a real search engine query log and a large real web page collection demonstrate that the SimFusion algorithm can significantly improve similarity measurement of web objects over both traditional content based similarity-calculating algorithms and the cutting edge SimRank algorithm

Information Storage and Retrieval of Composite Documents: A User Oriented Model of a Computer Message System

This paper outlines a new model of computer message systems based on a useroriented rather than a communications perspective. Most network users spend their time working with various types of 'composite documents' such as mail messages, news, reports, or entries in directories of names. They perform operations that are aided by a logically centralized but physically distributed world-wide information storage and retrieval system. Their concerns should be with creating, filing, submitting, searching, and retrieving documents, not with routing or transmission matters. Computer networks are rapidly proliferating. Their number and size are increasing, and interconnection is commonplace. High vol~ime applications like mail and news transmission are well established in offices, large corporations, and governmentally supported internets. Computer conferencing and directory assistance services are continuing to evoive. Standards for message formats, transmission protocols, and name/address directories have been recommended by DARPA, NBS, and CCI'IT. Research in document modeling, distributing databases, and retrieving text objects is being adapted to improve the functionality of computer message systems. Advanced techniques for text analysis, automatic indexing, query construction, description of comprehensive interest profiles, and retrospective or current awareness retrieval can simplify and improve the effectiveness of user agent software. Initial experimentation has shown the value of recognizing the structure of composite documents. Current work with the CSNET name server database, and with a collection of messages extracted from AIList digests distributed over the DARPA Internet, indicates that the proposed model accomodates mail, news, and directory assistance. Other work with book passage retrieval suggests that large files can be processed too. It is hoped that integration of these services, along with conferencing and database handling, will occur, as a new network for the Virginia Center for Innovative Technology is proposed and eventually implemented