Study of the global positioning system for maritime concepts/applications: Study of the feasibility of replacing maritime shipborne navigation systems with NAVSTAR

A geostationary reference satellite (REFSAT) that broadcasts every four seconds updated GPS satellite coordinates was developed. This procedure reduces the complexity of the GPS receiver. The economic and performance payoffs associated with replacing maritime stripborne navigation systems with NAVSTAR was quantified and the use of NAVSTAR for measurements of ocean currents in the broad ocean areas of the world was evaluated

COST ANALYSIS OF REQUIREMENTS, DESIGN, AND CODE REVIEWS AND HOW THIS IMPACTS THE COST OF QUALITY

This thesis examines the difference between accepted theoretical and real world return on investment of requirements, design, and code reviews. The differences have a significant impact on the cost of quality. The goal of this thesis is to examine the differences between two data sets (one derived from widely accepted software principles and one derived from real-world data) and draw conclusions about the effectiveness (cost vs. increase defect detection) of reviews based upon these analyses. This thesis will compare accepted relationships pertaining to cost per defect and overall project cost against actual data from a real world project in order to discover any significant differences. This research will also develop a cost estimation tool than may be used in future research to further develop the ideas and conclusions from this thesis. This author speculates that the cost benefit of reviews will decrease as the amount of time devoted to the review increases. This is contradictory to the accepted project management literature currently in wide use today

Development and Safety Assessment of Lentiviral Vector Gene Therapy for SCID-X1

This thesis work focuses on exploring ways to improve hematopoietic stem cell gene therapy for X-linked severe combined immunodeficiency disease (SCID-X1) using lentiviral vectors and a mouse model of the disease. This involved 3-part approach: modifying some components of the vector to improve efficacy and safety, improving the transplant conditions of the stem cell recipient mice, and bioinformatics analysis of vector integration sites to create a safety profile of the vectors under investigation. A series of experiments in SCID-X1 mice were undertaken to demonstrate the effectiveness and safety of the new vectors in vivo. The results of these experiments showed that self-inactivating lentiviral vectors using a codon optimized version of the therapeutic IL2RG gene and eukaryotic promoter elements were able to restore full immune system functionality to SCID-X1 mice while having a low risk of triggering adverse events. This research also underlined that pre-transplant conditioning of hematopoietic stem cell (HSC) recipients is vital to improve engraftment of gene therapy treated donor HSCs and maximize lymphocyte reconstitution. Over 100,000 vector integration sites were sequenced and analyzed, which required the creation of a new bioinformatics pipeline to efficiently annotate and analyze the resulting data. This led to a collaboration with the Erasmus MC department of Bioinformatics, resulting in a new web-based integration site analysis tool for public use

Uncertainties of predictions from parton distribution functions II: the Hessian method

We develop a general method to quantify the uncertainties of parton distribution functions and their physical predictions, with emphasis on incorporating all relevant experimental constraints. The method uses the Hessian formalism to study an effective chi-squared function that quantifies the fit between theory and experiment. Key ingredients are a recently developed iterative procedure to calculate the Hessian matrix in the difficult global analysis environment, and the use of parameters defined as components along appropriately normalized eigenvectors. The result is a set of 2d Eigenvector Basis parton distributions (where d=16 is the number of parton parameters) from which the uncertainty on any physical quantity due to the uncertainty in parton distributions can be calculated. We illustrate the method by applying it to calculate uncertainties of gluon and quark distribution functions, W boson rapidity distributions, and the correlation between W and Z production cross sections.Comment: 30 pages, Latex. Reference added. Normalization of Hessian matrix changed to HEP standar

Neutrino Dimuon Production and the Strangeness Asymmetry of the Nucleon

We have performed the first global QCD analysis to include the CCFR and NuTeV dimuon data, which provide direct constraints on the strange and anti-strange parton distributions, $s(x)$ and $\bar{s}(x)$. To explore the strangeness sector, we adopt a general parametrization of the non-perturbative $s(x), \bar{s}(x)$ functions satisfying basic QCD requirements. We find that the strangeness asymmetry, as represented by the momentum integral $[S^{-}]\equiv \int_0^1 x [s(x)-\bar{s}(x)] dx$, is sensitive to the dimuon data provided the theoretical QCD constraints are enforced. We use the Lagrange Multiplier method to probe the quality of the global fit as a function of $[S^-]$ and find $-0.001 < [S^-] < 0.004$. Representative parton distribution sets spanning this range are given. Comparisons with previous work are made.Comment: 23 pages, 4 figures; expanded version for publicatio