The Social Health of Nevada

As governor, I want to commend you as you work together to improve the social health of Nevada. As a private citizen, I welcome and encourage your efforts to better educate Nevadans about improving our quality of life. And as a former corporation executive, I would offer this simple advice: If you are going to make any significant inroads, you must be able to not only bring the public sector to the table, you must also get buy-in from the private sector as well

A 6,000 Stormwater Pond Task: Meeting the Needs of Diverse Audiences for Stormwater Pond Management Outreach in the Berkeley, Charleston and Dorchester Communities

2014 S.C. Water Resources Conference - Informing Strategic Water Planning to Address Natural Resource, Community and Economic Challenge

Application of Geochemical End-member Mixing Analysis to Delineate Water Sources in a Lowland Watershed

2008 S.C. Water Resources Conference - Addressing Water Challenges Facing the State and Regio

Meritor brake assembly bench part setup process improvement

In partnership with Meritor\u27s Manning, South Carolina facility, this capstone project focuses on the changeover process of a drum brake assembly for industrial trucks. The changeover process is the downtime an operator spends preparing the workstation for the next set of brake orders. This team\u27s objective is to use process improvement techniques to reduce downtime in between brake orders. Once the customer needs were determined, the team developed concepts to increase the efficiency of the changeover process time. The concepts consisted of real world applications and the utilization of a discrete event simulation software called Arena. In addition to the Arena model, the team has begun testing individual concepts. With the results from these tested concepts, the team will be able to effectively develop solutions to reduce downtime of operators during the changeover process

Using Water Chemistry Data to Quantify Source Contribution to Stream Flow in a Coastal Plain Watershed

2010 S.C. Water Resources Conference - Science and Policy Challenges for a Sustainable Futur

Stationkeeping, Orbit Determination, and Attitude Control for Spacecraft in Near Rectilinear Halo Orbits

Final document is attached. From a Near Rectilinear Halo Orbit (NRHO), NASA's Gateway at the Moon is planned to serve as a proving ground and a staging location for human missions beyond Earth. Stationkeeping, Orbit Determination (OD), and attitude control are examined for uncrewed and crewed Gateway configurations. Orbit maintenance costs are investigated using finite maneuvers, considering skipped maneuvers and perturbations. OD analysis assesses DSN tracking and identifies OD challenges associated with the NRHO and crewed operations. The Gateway attitude profile is simulated to determine an effective equilibrium attitude. Attitude control propellant use and sizing of the required passive attitude control system are assessed

Quasinormal Modes of Dirty Black Holes

Quasinormal mode (QNM) gravitational radiation from black holes is expected to be observed in a few years. A perturbative formula is derived for the shifts in both the real and the imaginary part of the QNM frequencies away from those of an idealized isolated black hole. The formulation provides a tool for understanding how the astrophysical environment surrounding a black hole, e.g., a massive accretion disk, affects the QNM spectrum of gravitational waves. We show, in a simple model, that the perturbed QNM spectrum can have interesting features.Comment: 4 pages. Published in PR

Natural Language, Mixed-Initiative Personal Assistant Agents

The increasing popularity and use of personal voice assistant technologies, such as Siri and Google Now, is driving and expanding progress toward the long-term and lofty goal of using artificial intelligence to build human-computer dialog systems capable of understanding natural language. While dialog-based systems such as Siri support utterances communicated through natural language, they are limited in the flexibility they afford to the user in interacting with the system and, thus, support primarily action-requesting and information-seeking tasks. Mixed-initiative interaction, on the other hand, is a flexible interaction technique where the user and the system act as equal participants in an activity, and is often exhibited in human-human conversations. In this paper, we study user support for mixed-initiative interaction with dialog-based systems through natural language using a bag-of-words model and k-nearest-neighbor classifier. We study this problem in the context of a toolkit we developed for automated, mixed-initiative dialog system construction, involving a dialog authoring notation and management engine based on lambda calculus, for specifying and implementing task-based, mixed-initiative dialogs. We use ordering at Subway through natural language, human-computer dialogs as a case study. Our results demonstrate that the dialogs authored with our toolkit support the end user\u27s completion of a natural language, human-computer dialog in a mixed-initiative fashion. The use of natural language in the resulting mixed-initiative dialogs afford the user the ability to experience multiple self-directed paths through the dialog and makes the flexibility in communicating user utterances commensurate with that in dialog completion paths---an aspect missing from commercial assistants like Siri

High fidelity state preparation, quantum control, and readout of an isotopically enriched silicon spin qubit

Quantum systems must be prepared, controlled, and measured with high fidelity in order to perform complex quantum algorithms. Control fidelities have greatly improved in silicon spin qubits, but state preparation and readout fidelities have generally been poor. By operating with low electron temperatures and employing high-bandwidth cryogenic amplifiers, we demonstrate single qubit readout visibilities >99%, exceeding the threshold for quantum error correction. In the same device, we achieve average single qubit control fidelities >99.95%. Our results show that silicon spin qubits can be operated with high overall operation fidelity