Color Centers in Alkali Halides

The purpose of this investigation is to examine Schottky defects in alkali-halides. Although they occur in pairs, only the anion vacancies lend themselves to the trapping of electrons. Thus, this project concerns only the anion portion of the Schottky defects

An agenda for sustainability transitions research: state of the art and future directions

Research on sustainability transitions has expanded rapidly in the last ten years, diversified in terms of topics and geographical applications, and deepened with respect to theories and methods. This article provides an extensive review and an updated research agenda for the field, classified into nine main themes: understanding transitions; power, agency and politics; governing transitions; civil society, culture and social movements; businesses and industries; transitions in practice and everyday life; geography of transitions; ethical aspects; and methodologies. The review shows that the scope of sustainability transitions research has broadened and connections to established disciplines have grown stronger. At the same time, we see that the grand challenges related to sustainability remain unsolved, calling for continued efforts and an acceleration of ongoing transitions. Transition studies can play a key role in this regard by creating new perspectives, approaches and understanding and helping to move society in the direction of sustainability

Data mining and analysis of large scale time series network data

Large amounts of data are readily available and collected daily by global networks worldwide. However, much of the real-time utility of this data is not realized, as data analysis tools for very large datasets, particularly time series data are cumbersome. This research presents a comparative study of three data mining tools using a large scale time series dataset from NOAA for analysis and mining. Meteorological data, gathered daily, if used at all, is useful for a very short period of time, both to help determine current weather conditions and to predict upcoming weather events. Current weather prediction methods can only guess at what the conditions will be in the near-term future, approximately one week at a time. The goal of this research project was to take large amounts of archival NOAA weather data and use appropriate data mining algorithms to identify patterns that could help predict future weather events. The results of this work identify the merits of the Rapid Miner tool over Weka and Orange, and provide future direction for data mining on massive data sets gathered from global networks. © 2013 IEEE

Visual and spatial data integration in mobile application design

Mobile application design is a strong motivator for student-centered computing. By including visual and spatial data in a mobile application, students can develop a 3-D implementation which can provide the mobile app users with a virtual experience. The development of a mobile app for a historical burial ground provides an example of how to integrate database information with visual and spatial data to achieve s virtual experience. The case study presented here, using both Android and iOS devices, includes three parts. Initially, an existing database was converted for mobile application access. This was followed by design integration in support of the desired mobile app features. Finally, the inclusion of an image gallery, with visual and spatial elements, integrated with the mobile application, resulted in a compelling mobile application, providing a virtual replica of an actual visit to the historical site. © 2014 Springer International Publishing